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CONFESSIONS 

of a 

YOUNG MAN 



by 
GEORGE MOORE 

Author of Esther Waters, Sister Teresa, &c, &c. 



NEW YORK 

BRENTANO'S 
MCMVII 



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CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 



CHAPTER I. 

MY soul, so far as 1 understand it, has very kindly 
taken color and form from the many various modes 
of life that self-will and an impetuous temperament have 
forced me to indulge in. Therefore I may say that I 
am free from original qualities, defects, tastes, etc. What 
I have I acquire, or, to speak more exactly, chance bestows, 
and still bestows, upon me. I came into the world appar- 
ently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no 
/mpress, but capable of receiving any ; of being moulded 
into all shapes. Nor am I exaggerating when I say I 
think that I might equally have been a Pharaoh, an ostler, 
a pimp, an archbishop, and that in the fulfilment of the 
duties of each a certain measure of success would have 
been mine. I have felt the goad of many impulses, I 
have hunted many a trail ; when one scent failed another 
was taken up, and pursued with the pertinacity of an in- 
stinct, rather than the fervor of a reasoned conviction. 
Sometimes, it is true, there came moments of weariness, 
of despondency, but they were not enduring : a word 
spoken, a book read, or yielding to the attraction of en- 
vironment, J was soon off in another direction, forgetful 



2 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

of past failures. Intricate, indeed was the labyrinth of 
my desires ; all lights were followed with the same ar- 
dor, all cries were eagerly responded to : they came 
from the right, they came from the left, from every side. 
But one cry was more persistent, and as the years 
passed I learned to follow it with increasing vigor, and 
my strayings grew fewer and the way wider. 

I was eleven years old when I first heard and obeyed 
this cry, or, shall I say, echo-augury ? 

Scene : A great family coach, drawn by two powerful 
country horses, lumbers along a narrow Irish road. 
The ever recurrent signs — long ranges of blue mountains, 
the streak of bog, the rotting cabin, the flock of plover 
rising from the desolate water. Inside the coach there 
are two children. They are smart with new jackets and 
neckties ; their faces are pale with sleep, and the roll- 
ing of the coach makes them feel a little sick. It is seven 
o'clock in the morning. Opposite the children are their 
parents, and they are talking of a novel the world is 
reading ? Did Lady Audley murder her husband ? Lady 
Audley ! What a beautiful name ; and she, who is a 
slender, pale, fairy-like woman, killed her husband. 
Such thoughts flashed through the boy's mind ; his imag- 
ination is stirred and quickened, and he begs for an ex- 
planation. The coach lumbers along, it arrives at its 
destination, and Lady Audley is forgotten in the delight 
of tearing down fruit-trees and killing a cat. 

But when we returned home I took the first opportu- 
nity of stealing the novel in question. I read it eagerly, 
passionately, vehemently. I read its successor and its 
successor. I read until I came to a book called " The 
Doctor's Wife " — a lady who loved Shelley and Byron. 
There was magic, there was revelation in the name, and 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 3 

Shelley became my soul's divinity. Why did I love 
Shelley ? Why was I not attracted to Byron ? I cannot 
say. Shelley ! Oh, that crystal name, and his poetry 
also crystalline. I must see it, I must know him. 

Escaping from the schoolroom, I ransacked the library, 
and at last my ardor was rewarded. The book — a 
small pocket edition in red boards, no doubt long out of 
print — opened at the " Sensitive Plant." Was I disap- 
pointed? I think I had expected to understand better ; 
but I had no difficultly in assuming that I was satisfied 
and delighted. And henceforth the little volume never 
left my pocket, and I read the dazzling stanzas by the 
shores of a pale green Irish lake, comprehending little, 
and loving a great deal. Byron, too, was often with me, 
and these poets were the ripening influence of years 
otherwise merely nervous and boisterous. 

And my poets were taken to school, because it pleased 
me to read " Queen Mab " and " Cain," amidst the priests 
and ignorance of a hateful Roman Catholic college. 
And there my poets saved me from intellectual savagery ; 
for I was incapable at that time of learning anything. 
What determined and incorrigible idleness ! I used to 
gaze fondly on a book, holding my head between my 
hands, and allow my thoughts to wander far into dreams 
and thin imaginings. Neither Latin, nor Greek, nor 
French, nor History, nor English composition could I 
learn, unless, indeed, my curiosity or personal interest 
was excited, — then I made rapid strides in that branch 
of knowledge to which my attention was directed. A 
mind hitherto dark seemed suddenly to grow clear, and 
it remained clear and bright enough so long as passion 
was in me ; but as it died so the mind clouded, and re- 
coiled to its original obtuseness. Couldn't, with wouldn't, 



4 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

was in my case curiously involved ; nor have I in this 
respect ever been able to correct my natural tempera- 
ment. I have always remained powerless to do anything 
unless moved by a powerful desire. 

The natural end to such school-days as mine was 
expulsion. I was expelled when I was sixteen, for 
idleness and general worthlessness. I returned to 
a wild country home, where I found my father 
engaged in training race-horses. For a nature of 
such intense vitality as mine, an ambition, an 
aspiration of some sort was necessary ; and I now, 
as I have often done since, accepted the first ideal 
to hand. In this instance it was the stable. I was given 
a hunter, I rode to hounds every week, I rode gallops 
every morning, I read the racing calendar, stud-book, 
latest betting, and looked forward with enthusiasm to 
the day when I should be known as a successful steeple- 
chase rider. To ride the winner of the Liverpool seemed 
to me a final achievement and glory ; and had not acci- 
dent intervened, it is very possible that I might have 
succeeded in carrying off, if not the meditated honor, 
something scarcely inferior, such as — alas, eheu fugaces ! 
I cannot now recall the name of a race of the necessary 
value and importance. About this time my father was 
elected Member of Parliament ; our home was broken 
up, and we went to London. But an ideal set up on its 
pedestal is not easily displaced, and I persevered in my 
love, despite the poor promises London life held out for 
its ultimate attainment ; and surreptitiously I continued 
to nourish it with small bets made in a small tobacconist's. 
Well do I remember that shop, the oily-faced, sandy- 
whiskered proprietor, his betting-book, the cheap cigars 
along the counter, the one-eyed nondescript who leaned 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 5 

his evening away against the counter, and was supposed 

to know some one who knew Lord 's footman, and 

the great man often spoken of, but rarely seen — he who 
made "a two-'undred pound book on the Derby"; and 
the constant coming and going of the cabmen — " Half 
an ounce of shag, sir." I was then at a military tutor's 
in the Euston Road ; for, in answer to my father's de- 
mand as to what occupation I intended to pursue, I had 
consented to enter the army. In my heart I knew that 
when it came to the point I should refuse — the idea of 
military discipline was very repugnant, and the possibility 
of an anonymous death on a battle-field could not be 
accepted by so self-conscious a youth, by one so full of 
his own personality. I said Yes to my father, because 
the moral courage to say No was lacking, and I put my 
trust in the future, as well I might, for a fair prospect of 
idleness lay before me, and the chance of my passing any 
examination was, indeed, remote. 

In London I made the acquaintance of a great blond 
man, who talked incessantly about beautiful women, and 
painted them sometimes larger than life, in somnolent 
attitudes and luxurious tints. His studio was a welcome 
contrast to the spitting and betting of the tobacco shop- 
His pictures — Dore-like improvisations, devoid of skill, 
and, indeed, of artistic perception, save a certain senti- 
ment for the grand and noble — filled me with wonder- 
ment and awe. " How jolly it would be to be a pain- 
ter," I once said, quite involuntarily. " Why, would you 
like to be a painter ? " he asked abruptly. I laughed, 
not suspecting that I had the slightest gift, as indeed 
was the case, but the idea remained in my mind, and 
soon after I began to make sketches in the streets and 
theatres. My attempts were not very successful, but 



6 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

they encouraged me to tell my father that I would go to 
the military tutor no more, and he allowed me to enter 
the Kensington Museum as an art student. There, of 
course, I learned nothing, and, from a merely Art point 
of view, I had much better have continued my sketches 
in the streets ; but the museum was a beautiful and 
beneficent influence, and one that applied marvellously 
well to the besetting danger of the moment ; for in the 
galleries I met young men who spoke of other things 
than betting and steeplechase riding, who, I remember, 
it was clear to me then, looked to a higher ideal than 
mine, breathed a purer atmosphere of thought than I. 
And then the sweet, white peace of antiquity ! The 
great, calm gaze that is not sadness nor joy, but some- 
thing that we know not of, which is lost to the world for 
ever. 

" But if you want to be a painter you must go to 
France — France is the only school of Art." I must 
again call attention to the phenomenon of echo-augury, 
that is to say, words heard in an unlooked-for quarter, 
that, without an appeal to our reason, impel belief. 
France ! The word rang in my ears and gleamed in my 
eyes. France ! All my senses sprang from sleep like 
a crew when the man on the look-out cries, " Land 
ahead ! " Instantly I knew I should, that I must, go to 
France, that I would live there, that I would become as 
a Frenchman, I knew not when nor how, but I knew I 
should go to France. . . . 

Then my father died, and I suddenly found myself 
heir to considerable property — some three or four thou- 
sands a^year : and then I knew that I was free to enjoy 
life as I pleased ; no further trammels, no further need of 
being a soldier, of being anything but myself : eighteen, 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 7 

with life and France before me ! But the spirit did not 
move me yet to leave home. I would feel the pulse of 
life at home before I felt it abroad. I would hire a 
studio. A studio — tapestries, smoke, models, conversa- 
tions. But here it is difficult not to convey a false 
impression. I fain would show my soul in these pages, 
like a face in a pool of clear water ; and although my 
studio was in truth no more than an amusement, and a 
means of effectually throwing over all restraint, I did not 
view it at all in this light. My love of Art was very 
genuine and deep-rooted ; the tobacconist's betting-book 
was now as nothing, and a certain Botticelli in the 
National Gallery held me in tether. And when I look 
back and consider the past, I am forced to admit that I 
might have grown up in less fortunate circumstances, 
for even the studio, with its dissipations — and they were 
many — was not unserviceable ; it developed the natural 
man, who educates himself, who allows his mind to grow 
and ripen under the sun and wind of modern life, in 
contra-distinction to the University man, who is fed upon 
the dust of ages, and after a formula which has been 
composed to suit the requirements of the average human 
being. 

Nor was my reading at this time so limited as might 
be expected from the foregoing. The study of Shelley's 
poetry had led me to read pretty nearly all the English 
lyric poets ; Shelley's atheism had led me to read Kant, 
Spinoza, Godwin, Darwin, and Mill ; and these, again, 
in their turn, introduced me to many writers and various 
literature. I do not think that at this time I cared much 
for novel reading. Scott seemed to me on a-par with 
Burke's speeches ; that is to say, too impersonal for my 
very personal taste. Dickens I knew by heart, and 



8 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

" Bleak House " I thought his greatest achievement. 
Thackeray left no deep impression on my mind ; in no 
way did he hold my thoughts. He was not picturesque 
like Dickens, and I was at that time curiously eager for 
some adequate philosophy of life, and his social satire 
seemed very small beer indeed. I was really young. I 
hungered after great truths : " Middlemarch," " Adam 
Bede," " The Rise and Fall of Rationalism," " The His- 
tory of Civilization," were momentous events in my life. 
But I loved life better than books, and I cultivated with 
care the acquaintance of a neighbor who had taken the 
Globe Theatre for the purpose of producing Offenbach's 
operas. Bouquets, stalls, rings, delighted me. I was 
not dissipated, but I loved the abnormal. I loved to 
spend as much on scent and toilet knick-knacks as 
would keep a poor man's family in affluence for ten 
months ; and I smiled at the fashionable sunlight in the 
Park, the dusty cavalcades ; and I loved to shock my 
friends by bowing to those whom I should not bow to ; 
above all, the life of the theatres, that life of raw 
gas-light, whitewashed wails, of light, doggerel verse, 
slangy polkas and waltzes, interested me beyond legiti- 
mate measure, so curious and unreal did it seem. I 
lived at home, but dined daily at a fashionable restaur- 
ant ; at half -past eight I was at the theatre. Nodding 
familiarly to the doorkeeper, I passed up the long 
passage to the stage. Afterwards supper. Cremorne 
and the Argyle Rooms were my favorite haunts. My 
mother suffered, and expected ruin, for I took no trouble 
to conceal anything ; I boasted of dissipations. But 
there was no need for fear ; I was naturally endowed 
with a very clear sense indeed of self-preservation ; I 
neither betted nor drank, nor contracted debts, nor a 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 9 

secret marriage ; from a worldly point of view, I was a 
moaei young man indeed ; and when I returned home 
about four in the morning, I watched the pale moon 
setting, and repeating some verses of Shelley, I thought 
how I should go to Paris when I was of age, and study 
painting. 



CHAPTER II. 

AT last the day came, and with several trunks and 
boxes full of clothes, books, and pictures, I 
started, accompanied by an English valet, for Paris and 
Art. 

We all know the great gray and melancholy Gare du 
Nord, at half-past six in the morning ; and the miserable 
carriages, and the tall, haggard city. Pale, sloppy, 
yellow houses ; an oppressive absence of color ; a pecu- 
liar bleakness in the streets. The mfnagere hurries 
down the asphalte to market ; a dreadful gar$on de caff, 
with a napkin tied around his throat, moves about some 
chairs, so decrepit and so solitary that it seems impos- 
sible to imagine a human being sitting there. Where 
are the Boulevards ? Where are the Champs Elys£es ? 
I asked myself ; and feeling bound to apologize for the 
appearance of the city, I explained to my valet that we 
were passing through some by-streets, and returned to 
the study of a French vocabulary. Nevertheless, when 
the time came to formulate a demand for rooms, hot 
water, and a fire, I broke down, and the proprietress of 
the hotel, who spoke English, had to be sent for. 

My plans, so far as I had any, were to enter the beaux 
arts — Cabanel's studio for preference ; for I had then 
an intense and profound admiration for that painter's 
work. I did not think much of the application I was 
told I should have to make at the Embassy ; my thoughts 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. n 

were fixed on the master, and my one desire was to see 
him. To see him was easy, to speak to him was another 
matter, and I had to wait three weeks, until I could hold 
a conversation in French. How I achieved this feat I 
cannot say. I never opened a book, I know, nor is it 
agreeable to think what my language must have been 
like — like nothing ever heard under God's sky before, 
probably. It was, however, sufficient to waste a good 
hour of the painter's time. I told him of my artistic 
sympathies, what pictures I had seen of his in London, 
and how much pleased I was with those then in his 
studio. He went through the ordeal without flinching. 
He said he would be glad to have me as a pupil. 

But life in the beaux arts is rough, course, and rowdy. 
The model sits only three times a week : the other days 
we worked from the plaster cast ; and to be there by 
seven o'clock in the morning required so painful an 
effort of will, that I glanced in terror down the dim and 
gray perspective of early risings that awaited me ; then, 
demoralized by the lassitude of Sunday, I told my valet 
on Monday morning to leave the room, that I would 
return to the beaux arts no more. I felt humiliated at 
my own weakness, for much hope had been centred in 
that academy ; and I knew no other. Day after day I 
walked up and down the Boulevards, studying the pho- 
tographs of the salon pictures, and was stricken by the 
art of Jules Lefevre. True it is that I saw it was want- 
ing in that tender grace which I am forced to admit 
even now, saturated though I now am with the aesthet- 
ics of different schools, is inherent in Cabanel's work ; 
but at the time I am writing of, my nature was too 
young and mobile to resist the conventional attractive- 
ness of nude figures, indolent attitudes, long hair, slen- 



12 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

der hips and hands, and I accepted Jules Lefevre wholly 
and unconditionally. He hesitated, however, when I 
asked to be taken as a private pupil, but he wrote out 
the address of a studio where he gave instruction every 
Tuesday morning. This was even more to my taste, for 
I had an instinctive liking for Frenchmen, and was 
anxious to see as much of them as possible. 

The studio was perched high up in the Passage des 
Panoramas. There I found M. Julien, a typical meridi- 
onal — the large stomach, the dark eyes, crafty and 
watchful ; the seductively mendacious manner, the sen* 
sual mind. We made friends at once — he consciously 
making use of me, I unconsciously making use of him. 
To him my forty francs, a month's subscription, were a 
godsend, nor were my invitations to dinner and to the 
theatre to be disdained. I was curious, odd, quaint. 
To be sure it was a little tiresome to have to put up with 
a talkative person, whose knowledge of the French lan- 
guage had been acquired in three months, but the din- 
ners were good. No doubt Julien reasoned so ; I did 
not reason at all. I felt this crafty, clever man of the 
world was necessary to me. I had never met such a 
man before, and all my curiosity was awake. He spoke 
of art and literature, of the world and the flesh ; he told 
me of the books he had read, he narrated thrilling inci- 
dents in his own life ; and the moral reflections with 
which he sprinkled his conversation I thought very strik- 
ing. Like every young man of twenty, I was on the 
lookout for something to set up that would do duty for 
an ideal. The world was to me, at this time, what a toy 
shop had been fifteen years before : everything was 
spick and span, and every illusion was set out straight 
and smart in new paint and gilding. But Julien kept 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. I3 

me at a distance, and the rare occasions when he favored 
me with his society only served to prepare my mind for 
the friendship which awaited me, and was destined to 
absorb some years of my life. 

In the studio there was some eighteen or twenty 
young men, and among these there were some four or 
five from whom I could learn ; and there were also there 
some eight or nine young English girls. We sft round 
in a circle, and drew from the model. And this reversal 
of all the world's opinions and prejudices was to me 
singularly delightful ; I loved the sense of unreality that 
the exceptionalness of our life in this studio conveyed. 
Besides, the women themselves were young and inter- 
esting, and were, therefore, one of the charms of the 
place, giving, as they did, that sense of sex which is so 
subtle a mental pleasure, and which is, in its outward 
aspect, so interesting to the eye — the gowns, the hair 
lifted, showing the neck ; the earrings, the sleeves open 
at the elbow. Though all this was very dear to me I did 
not fall in love : but he who escapes a woman's domin- 
ion generally comes under the sway of some friend who 
ever uses a strange attractiveness, and fosters a sort of 
dependency that is not healthful or valid ; and although 
I look back with undiminished delight on the friendship 
I contracted about this time— a friendship which per- 
meated and added to my life — I am nevertheless forced 
to recognize that, however suitable it may have been in 
my special case, in the majority of instances it would 
have proved but a shipwrecking reef, on which a young 
man's life would have gone to pieces. What saved me 
was the intensity of my passion for art, and a moral 
revolt against any action that I thought could or would 
definitely compromise me in that direction. I was will- 



14 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

ing to stray a little from my path, but never further 
than a single step, which I could retrace when I pleased. 

One day I raised my eyes, and saw there was a new- 
comer in the studio ; and, to my surprise, for he was 
fashionably dressed, and my experience had not led me 
to believe in the marriage of genius and well-cut cloth, 
he was painting very well indeed. His shoulders were 
beautiful and broad ; a long neck, a tiny head, a nar- 
row, thin face, and large eyes, full of intelligence and 
fascination. And although he could not have been 
working more than an hour, he had already sketched in 
his figure, and with all the surroundings — screens, lamps, 
stoves, etc. I was deeply interested. I asked the young 
lady next me if she knew who he was. She could give 
me no information. But at four o'clock there was a 
general exodus from the studio, and we adjourned to a 
neighboring cafe to drink beer. The way through a 
narrow passage, and as we stooped under an archway, 
the young man (Marshall was his name) spoke to me in 
English. Yes, we had met before ; we had exchanged 
a few words in So-and-So's studio — the great blond 
man, whose Dore-like improvisations had awakened 
aspiration in me. 

The usual reflections on the chances of life were of 
course made, and then followed the inevitable " Will you 
dine with me to-night ? " Marshall thought the follow- 
ing day would suit him better, but I was very pressing. 
He offered to meet me at my hotel ; or would I come 
with him to his rooms, and he would show me some 
pictures — some trifles he had brought up from the 
country ? Nothing would please me better. We got 
into a cab. Then every moment revealed new qualities, 
new superiorities, in my new-found friend. Not only 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 15 

was he tall, strong, handsome, and beautifully dressed, 
infinitely better dressed than I, but he could talk French 
like a native. It was only natural that he should, for he 
was born and had lived in Brussels all his life, but the 
accident of birth rather stimulated trren calmed my 
erubescent admiration. He spoke of, and he was clearly 
on familiar terms with, the fashionable restaurants and 
actresses ; he stopped at a hairdresser's to have his hair 
curled. All this was very exciting, and a little bewilder- 
ing. I was on the tiptoe of expectation to see his apart- 
ments ; and, not to be utterly outdone, I alluded to my 
valet. 

His apartments were not so grand as I expected ; but 
when he explained that he had just spent ten thousand 
pounds in two years, and was now living on six or seven 
hundred francs a month, which his mother would allow 
him until he had painted and had sold a certain series 
of pictures, which he contemplated beginning at once, 
my admiration increased to wonder, and I examined with 
awe the great fireplace which had been constructed at 
his orders, and admired the iron pot which hung by a 
chain above an artificial bivouac fire. This detail will 
suggest the rest of the studio — the Turkey carpet, the 
brass harem lamps, the Japanese screen, the pieces of 
drapery, the oak chairs covered with red Utrecht velvet, 
the oak wardrobe that had been picked up somewhere, — 
a ridiculous bargain, and the inevitable bed with spiral 
columns. There were vases filled with foreign grasses, 
and palms stood in the corners of the rooms. Marshall 
pulled out a few pictures ; but he paid very little heed 
to my compliments ; and, sitting down at the piano, with 
a great deal of splashing and dashing about the keys, he 
rattled off a waltz. 



l6 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

" What waltz is that ! " I asked. 

" Oh, nothing ; something I composed the other even- 
ing. I had a fit of the blues, and didn't go out. What 
do you think of it ? " 

" I think it beautiful ; did you really compose that the 
other evening ? " 

At this moment a knock was heard at the door, and a 
beautiful English girl entered. Marshall introduced 
me. With looks that see nothing, and words that mean 
nothing, an amorous woman receives the man she finds 
with her sweetheart. But it subsequently transpired that 
Alice had an appointment, that she was dining out. 
She would, however, call in the morning, and give him a 
sitting for the portrait he was painting of her. 

I had hitherto worked very regularly and attentively 
at the studio, but now Marshall's society was an attrac- 
tion I could not resist. For the sake of his talent, which 
I religiously believed in, I regretted he was so idle ; but 
his dissipation was winning, and his delight was thorough, 
and his gay, dashing manner made me feel happy, and 
his experience opened to me new avenues for enjoy- 
ment and knowledge of life. On my arrival in Paris I 
had visited, in the company of my taciturn valet, the 
Mabille and the Valentino, and I had dined at the Mai- 
son d'Or by myself ; but now I was taken to strange 
students' cafes, where dinners were paid for in pictures ; 
to a mysterious place, where a table d'hote was held under 
a tent in a back garden ; and afterwards we went in 
great crowds to Bullier, Chateau Rouge, or the Elyse'e 
Montmartre. The clangor of the band, the unreal 
greenness of the foliage, the thronging of the dancers 
and the chattering of women, whose Christian names we 
only knew. And then the returning in open carriages 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 17 

rolling through the white dust beneath the immense 
heavy dome of the summer night, when the dusty dark- 
ness of the street is chequered by a passing glimpse of 
light skirts or flying feather, and the moon looms like a 
magic lantern out of the sky. 

Now we seemed to live in fiacres and restaurants, and 
the afternoons were filled with febrile impressions. Mar- 
shall had a friend in this street, and another in that. It 
was only necessary for him to cry " Stop ! " to the coach- 
men, and to run up two or three flights of stairs 

" Madame , est-elle chez elle ? " 

" Out, Monsieur j si Monsieur veut se donner la peine 
d'entrer." And we were shown into a handsomely fur- 
nished apartment. A lady would enter hurriedly, and 
an animated discussion was begun. I did not know 
French sufficiently well to follow the conversation, but I 
remember it always commenced mon cher ami, and was 
plentifully sprinkled with the phrase vous avez tort. The 
ladies themselves had only just returned from Constanti- 
nople or Japan, and they were generally involved in 
mysterious lawsuits, or were busily engaged in prosecut- 
ing claims for several millions of francs against different 
foreign governments. 

And just as I had watched the chorus girls and mum- 
mers, three years ago, at the Globe Theatre, now, existed 
by a nervous curiosity, I watched this world of Parisian 
adventurers and lights o' love. And this craving for 
observation of manners, this instinct for the rapid nota- 
tion of gestures and words that epitomize a state of 
feeling, of attitudes that mirror forth the soul, declared 
itself a main passion ; and it grew and strengthened, to 
the detriment of the other Art so dear to me. With the 



l8 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

patience of a cat before a mouse-hole, I watched and 
listened, picked one characteristic phrase out of hours 
of vain chatter, interested and amused by an angry or 
loving glance. Like the midges that fret the surface of 
a shadowy stream these men and women seemed to me ; 
and though I laughed, danced, and made merry with 
them, I was not of them. But with Marshall it was dif- 
ferent : they were my amusement, they were his neces- 
sary pleasure. And I knew of this distinction that made 
twain our lives ; and I reflected deeply upon it. Why 
could I not live without an ever-present and acute con- 
sciousness of life ? Why could I not love, forgetful of 
the harsh ticking of the clock in the perfumed silence of 
the chamber ? 

And so my friend became to me a study, a subject for 
dissection. The general attitude of his mind and its 
various turns, all the apparent contradictions, and how 
they could be explained, classified, and reduced to one 
primary law, were to me a constant source of thought. 
Our confidences knew no reserve. I say our confi- 
dences, because to obtain confidence it is often necessary 
to confide. All we saw, heard, read, or felt was the 
subject of mutual confidences : the transitory emotion 
that a flush of color and a bit of perspective awakens, 
the blue tints that the sunsetting lends to a white dress, 
or the eternal verities, death and love. But, although I 
tested every fibre of thought and analyzed every motive, 
I was very sincere in my friendship, and very loyal in 
my admiration. Nor did my admiration wane when I 
discovered that Marshall was shallow in his apprecia- 
tions, superficial in his judgments, that his talents did 
not pierce below the surface ; // avait ] se grand air ; 
there was fascination in his very bearing, in his large, 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 19 

soft, colorful eyes, and a go and dash in his dissipations 
that carried you away. 

To any one observing us at this time it would have 
seemed that I was but a hanger-on and a feeble imitator 
of Marshall. I took him to my tailor's, and he advised 
me on the cut of my coats ; he showed me how to 
arrange my rooms and I strove to copy his manner ot 
speech and his general bearing ; and yet I knew very 
well indeed that mine was a rarer and more original 
nature. I was willing to learn, that was all. There was 
much that Marshall could teach me, and I used him 
without shame, without stint. I used him as I have used 
all those with whom I have been brought into close con- 
tact. Search my memory as I will, I cannot recall a 
case of man or woman who ever occupied any consider- 
able part of my thoughts and did not contribute largely 
towards my moral or physical welfare. In other words, 
and in very colloquial language, I never had useless 
friends hanging about me. From this crude statement 
of a signal fact, the thoughtless reader will at once judge 
me rapacious, egotistical, false, fawning, mendacious. 
Well, I may be all this and more, but not because all 
who have known me have rendered me eminent services. 
I can say that no one ever formed relationships in life 
with less design than myself. Never have I given a 
thought to the advantage that might accrue from being 
on terms of friendship with this man and avoiding that 
one. " Then how do you explain," cries the angry 
reader, " that you have never had a friend whom you 
did not make a profit out of ? You must have had very 
few friends." On the contrary, I have had many friends 
and of all sorts and kinds — men and women : and, I 
repeat, none took part in my life who did not contribute 



20 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

something towards my well-being. It must, of course, 
be understood that I make no distinction between 
mental and material help ; and in my case the one has 
ever been adjuvant to the other. "Pooh, pooh ! " again 
exclaims the reader ; " I for one will not believe that 
chance has only sent across your way the people who 
were required to assist you." Chance ! dear reader, is 
there such a thing as chance ? Do you believe in 
chance? Do you attach any precise meaning to the 
word ! Do you employ it at haphazard, allowing it to 
mean what it may ? Chance ! What a field for psychi- 
cal investigation is at once opened up ; how we may tear 
to shreds our past lives in search of — what ? Of the 
Chance that made us. I think, reader, I can throw 
some light on the general question, by replying to your 
taunt : Chance, on the conditions of life under which we 
live, sent, of course, thousands of creatures across my 
way who were powerless to benefit me ; but then an 
instinct of which I knew nothing, of which I was not 
even conscious, withdrew me from them, and I was 
attracted to others. Have you not seen a horse sud- 
denly leave a corner of a field to seek pasturage further 
away? 

Never could I interest myself in a book if it were not 
the exact diet my mind required at the time, or in the 
very immediate future. The mind asked, received, and 
digested. So much was assimilated, so much expelled ; 
then, after a season, similar demands were made, the 
same processes were repeated out of sight, below con- 
sciousness, as is the case in a well-ordered stomach. 
Shelley, who fired my youth with passion, and purified 
and upbore it for so long, is now to me as nothing : not 
a dead or faded thing, but a thing out of which I per- 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 21 

sonally have drawn all the sustenance I may draw from 
him ; and, therefore, it (that part which I did not absorb) 
concerns me no more. And the same with Gautier. 
Mile, de Maupin, that godhead of flowing line, that 
desire not " of the moth for the star," but for such per- 
fection of hanging arm and leaned thigh as leaves 
passion breathless and fain of tears, is now, if I take up 
the book and read, weary and ragged as a spider's web, 
that has hung the winter through in the dusty, forgotten 
corner of a forgotten room. My old rapture and my 
youth's delight I can regain only when I think of that 
part of Gautier which is now incarnate in me. 

As I picked up books, so I picked up my friends. I 
read friends and books with the same passion, with the 
same avidity ; and as I discarded my books when I had 
assimilated as much of them as my system required, so 
I discarded my friends when they ceased to be of use to 
me. I use the word " use " in its fullest, not in its lim- 
ited and twenty-shilling sense. This reduction of the 
intellect to the blind unconsciousness of the lower organs 
will strike some as a violation of man's best beliefs, and 
as saying very little for the particular intellect that can 
be so reduced. But I am not sure these people are 
right. I am inclined to think that as you ascend the 
scaie of thought to the great minds, these unaccountable 
impulses, mysterious resolutions, sudden but certain 
knowings, falling whence, or how it is impossible to say, 
but falling somehow into the brain, instead of growing 
rarer, become more and more frequent ; indeed, I think 
that if the really great man were to confess to the work- 
ing of his mind, we should see him constantly besieged 
by inspirations .... inspirations ! Ah ! how human 
thought only turns in a circle, and how, when we think 



22 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

we are on the verge of a new thought, we slip into the 
enunciation of some time-worn truth. But I say again, 
let general principle be waived ; it will suffice for the 
interest of these pages if it be understood that brain in- 
stincts have always been, and still are, the initial and the 
determining powers of my being. 

******* 

But the studio, where I had been working for the last 
three or four months so diligently, became wearisome to 
me, and for two reasons. First, because it deprived me 
ol many hours of Marshall's company. Secondly — and 
the second reason was the graver — because I was begin- 
ning to regard the delineation of a nymph, or youth 
bathing, etc., as a very narrow channel to carry off the 
the strong, full tide of a man's thought. For now 
thoughts of love and death, and the hopelessness of life, 
were in active fermentation within me and sought for 
utterance with a strange unintermittingness of appeal. 
I yearned merely to give direct expression to my pain. 
Life was then in its springtide ; every thought was new 
to me, and it would have seemed a pity to disguise even 
the simplest emotion in any garment when it was so 
beautiful in its Eden-like nakedness. The creatures 
whom I met in the ways and by-ways of Parisian life, 
whose gestures and attitudes I devoured with my eyes, 
and whose souls I hungered to know, awoke in me a 
tense irresponsible curiosity, but that was all, — I des- 
pised, I hated them, thought them contemptible, and to 
select them as subjects of artistic treatment could not 
then, might never, have occurred to me, had the sug- 
gestion to do so not come direct to me from the out- 
side. 

At the time I am writing I lived in an old-fashioned 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 23 

hotel on the Boulevard, which an enterprising Belgian 
had lately bought and was endeavoring to modernize ; 
an old-fashioned hotel, that still clung to its ancient 
character in the presence of half a dozen old people, 
who, for antediluvian reasons, continue to dine on cer- 
tain well-specified days at the table d'hdte. Fifteen 
years have passed away, and these old people, no doubt, 
have joined their ancestors ; but I can see them still 
sitting in that salle a manger; the buffets en vieux chine ; 
the opulent candelabra en style d empire ; the waiter 
lighting the gas in the pale Parisian evening. That 
white-haired man, that tall, thin, hatchet-faced Ameri- 
can, has dined at this table d'hdte for the last thirty 
years — he is talkative, vain, foolish, and authoritative. 
The clean, neatly-dressed old gentleman who sits by 
him, looking so much like a French gentleman, has 
spent a great part of his life in Spain. With that piece 
of news, and its subsequent developments, your ac- 
quaintance with him begins and ends ; the eyes, the fan, 
the mantilla, how it began, how it was broken off, and 
how it began again. Opposite sits another French gen- 
tleman, with beard and bristly hair. He spent twenty 
years of his life in India, and he talks of his son who has 
been out there for the last ten, and who has just re- 
turned home. There is the Italian comtesse of sixty 
summers, who dresses like a girl of sixteen and smokes 
a cigar after dinner, — if there are not too many strangers 
in the room. She terms a stranger any one whom she 
has not seen at least once before. The little fat, neck- 
less man, with the great bald head, fringed below the 
ears with hair, is M. Duval. He is a dramatic author — 
the author of a hundred and sixty plays. He does not 
intrude himself on your notice, but when you speak to 



24 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

him on literary matters he fixes a pair of tiny, sloe-like 
eyes on you, and talks affably of his collaborateurs. 

I was soon deeply interested in M. Duval, and I 
invited him to come to the cafe after dinner. I paid for 
his coffee and liqueurs, I offered him a choice cigar. 
He did not smoke ; I did. It was, of course, inevitable 
that I should find out that he had not had a play pro- 
duced for the last twenty years, but then the aureole of 
the hundred and sixty was about his poor bald head. I 
thought of the chances of life, he alluded to the war ; 
and so this unpleasantness was passed over, and we 
entered on more genial subjects of conversation. He 
had written plays with everybody ; his list of colla- 
borateurs was longer than any list of lady patron- 
esses for an English county ball ; there was no literary 
kitchen in which he had not helped to dish up. I 
was at once amazed and delighted. Had M. Duval 
written his hundred and sixty plays in the seclusion 
of his own rooms, I should have been less sur- 
prised ; it was the mystery of the seances of colla- 
boration, the rendezvous, the discussion, the illus- 
trious company, that overwhelmed me in a rapture 
of wonder and respectful admiration. Then came 
the anecdotes. They were of all sorts. Here are a few 
specimens : He, Duval, had written a one-act piece with 
Dumas perej it had been refused at the Francais, and 
then it had been about, here, there, and everywhere ; 
finally the Varietes had asked for some alterations, and 
c'etait une affair entendue. " I made the alterations one 
afternoon, and wrote to Dumas, and what do you think, — 
by return of post I had a letter from him saying he could 
not consent to the production of a one-act piece, signed 
by him, at the Varie'te's, because his son was then giving 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 2$ 

a five-act piece at the Gymnase." Then came a string 
of indecent witticisms by Suzanne Lagier and Dejazet. 
They were as old as the world, but they were new to me 
and I was amused and astonished. These bon-mots were 
followed by an account of how Gautier wrote his Sunday 
feuilleton, and how he and Balzac had once nearly come 
to blows. They had agreed to collaborate. Balzac was 
to contribute the scenario, Gautier the dialogue. One 
morning Balzac came with the scenario of the first act. 
'' Here it is, Gautier ! I suppose you can let me have it 
back finished by to-morrow afternoon ? " And the old 
gentleman would chirp along in this fashion till midnight. 
I would then accompany him to his rooms in the Quartier 
Montmartre — rooms high up on the fifth floor — where, 
between two pictures, supposed to be by Angelica Kauf- 
mann, M. Duval had written unactable plays for the last 
twenty years, and where he would continue to write un- 
actable plays until God called him to a world, perhaps, 
of eternal cantatas, but where, by all accounts, /' exposi- 
tion de la piece selon la formule de M. Scribe is still un- 
known. 

How I used to enjoy these conversations ! I remem- 
ber how I used to stand on the pavement after having 
bid the old gentleman good-night, regretting I had not 
demanded some further explanation regarding le mouve- 
ment Romantique, or la facon de M. Scribe de manager la 
situation. 

Why not write a comedy ! So the thought came. I 
had never written anything save a few ill-spelt letters ; 
but no matter. To find a plot, that was the first thing 
to do. Take Marshall for hero and Alice for heroine, 
surround them with the old gentlemen who dined at the 
table d'hote, flavor with the Italian countess who smoked 



26 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

cigars when there were not too many strangers present. 
After three weeks of industrious stirring, the ingredients 
did begin to simmer into something resembling a plot. 
Put it upon paper. Ah ! there was my difficulty. I re- 
membered suddenly that I had read "Cain," " Manfred," 
" The Cenci," as poems, without ever thinking of how 
the dialogue looked on paper ; besides, they were in 
blank verse. I hadn't a notion how prose dialogue would 
look on paper. Shakespeare I had never opened ; no in- 
stinctive want had urged me to read him. He had re- 
mained, therefore, unread, unlooked at. Should I buy 
a copy ? No ; the name repelled me — as all popular 
names repelled me. In preference I went to the Gym- 
nase, and listened attentively to a comedy by M. Dumas 
fils. But strain my imagination as I would, I could not 
see the spoken words in their written form. Oh, for a 
look at the prompter's copy, the corner of which I could 
see when I leaned forward ! At last I discovered in 
Galignani's library a copy of Leigh Hunt's edition of the 
old dramatists, and, after a month's study of Congreve, 
Wycherley, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, I completed a com- 
edy in three acts, which I entitled " Worldliness." It 
was, of course, very bad ; but, if my memory serves me 
well, I do not think it was nearly so bad as might be 
imagined. 

No sooner was the last scene written than I started 
at once for London, confident I should find no difficulty 
in getting my play produced. 



CHAPTER III. 

IS it necessary to say that I did not find a manager to 
produce my play ? A printer was more attainable, 
and the correction of proofs amused me for a while. I 
wrote another play ; and when the hieing after theatrical 
managers began to lose its attractiveness my thoughts 
reverted to France, which always haunted me ; and 
which now possessed me as if with the sweet and mag- 
netic influence of home. 

How important my absence from Paris seemed to me ; 
and how Paris rushed into my eyes ! — Paris — public 
ball-rooms, cafe's, the models in the studio and the young 
girls painting, and Marshall, Alice, and Julien. Mar- 
shall ! — my thoughts pointed at him through the inter- 
vening streets and the endless possession of people 
coming and going. 

" M. Marshall, is he at home ? " " M. Marshall left 
here some months ago." " Do you know his address ?" 
" I'll ask my husband." " Do you know M. Marshall's 
address?" " Yes, he's gone to live in the Rue de 
Douai." "What number ? " "I think it is fifty-four." 
" Thanks." " Coachman, wake up ; drive me to the Rue 
de Douai." 

But Marshall was not to be found at the Rue de 
Douai ; and he had left no address. There was nothing 
for it but to go to the studio ; I should be able to ob- 
tain news of him there, — perhaps find him. But when I 

27 



28 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

pulled aside the curtain, the accustomed piece of slim 
nakedness did not greet my eyes ; only the blue apron 
of an old woman enveloped in a cloud of dust. " The 
gentlemen are not here to-day, the studio is closed ; I 
am sweeping up." " Oh, and where is M. Julien ? " 
" I cannot say, sir : perhaps at the cafe, or perhaps he 
is gone to the country." This was not very encourag- 
ing, and now, my enthusiasm thoroughly damped, I 
strolled along le Passage, looking at the fans, the bangles 
and the litter of cheap trinkets that each window was 
filled with. On the left at the corner of the Boulevard 
was our cafe'. As I came forward the waiter moved one 
of the tin tables, and then I saw the fat Provencal. But 
just as if he had seen me yesterday he said, " Tiens / 
c'est vous j une deme tassel oui . . . gar f on, une deme 
tasse." Presently the conversation turned on Marshall ; 
they had not seen much of him lately. " 77 parait qu'il 
est plus amoureux que jamais," Julien replied sardoni- 
cally. 

I found my friend in large furnished apartments on 
the ground floor in the Rue Duphot. The walls were 
stretched with blue silk, there were large mirrors and 
great gilt cornices. Passing into the bedroom I found 
the young god wallowing in the finest of fine linen — in a 
great Louis XV. bed, and there were cupids above him. 
" Holloa ! what, you back again, Dayne ? we thought 
we weren't going to see you again." 

" It's nearly one o'clock : get up. What's the news ? " 
" To-day is the opening of the exposition of the Im- 
pressionists. We'll have a bit of breakfast round the 
corner, at Durant's, and we'll go on there. I hear that 
Bedlam is nothing to it ; there is a canvas there twenty 
feet square and in three tints : pale yellow for the sun- 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 29 

light, brown for the shadows, and all the rest is sky-blue. 
There is, I am told, a lady walking in the foreground 
with a ring-tailed monkey, and the tail is said to be three 
yards long." 

And so we went to jeer a group of enthusiasts that 
willingly forfeit all delights of the world in the hope of 
realizing a new sestheticism ; we went insolent with patent 
leather shoes and bright kid gloves, and armed with all 
the jargon of the school. " Cette jambe ne porte pas"; 
" la nature ne se fait pas comme ga "j " o?i dessine par les 
masses; combien de tetes ? " " Sept et deml." " SI f avals 
un morceau de crale je mettrais celle-la dans un bocal, c'est 
un fcetus" etc.; in a word, all that the journals of culture 
are pleased to term an artistic education. And then the 
boisterous laughter, exaggerated in the hope of giving as 
much pain as possible. 

The history of Impressionist art is simple. In the 
beginning of this century the tradition of French art — 
the tradition of Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau — had 
been completely lost ; having produced genius, their art 
died. Ingres is the sublime flower of the classic art 
which succeeded the art of the palace and the boudoir : 
further than Ingres it was impossible to go, and his art 
died. Then the Turners and Constables came to France, 
and they begot Troyon, and Troyon begot Millet, Cour- 
bet, Corot, and Rousseau, and these in turn begot Degas, 
Pissarro, Madame Morizot, and Guillaumin. Degas is 
a pupil of Ingres, but he applies the marvellous acute- 
ness of drawing he learned from his master to delinea- 
ting the humblest aspects of modern life. Degas draws 
not by the masses, but by the character ; — his subjects 
are shop-girls, ballet-girls, and washerwomen, but the 
qualities that endow them with immortality are precisely 



30 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

those which eternalize the virgins and saints of Leonardo 
da Vinci in the minds of men. You see the fat, vulgar 
woman in the long cloak trying on a hat in front of the 
pier-glass. So marvellously well are the lines of her 
face observed and rendered that you can tell exactly 
what her position in life is ; you know what the furni- 
ture of her rooms is like ; you know what she would 
say to you if she were to speak. She is as typical of 
the nineteenth century as Fragonard's ladies are of 
the Court of Louis XV. To the right you see a pic- 
ture of two shop-girls with bonnets in their hands. So 
accurately are the habitual movements of the heads 
and the hands observed that you at once realize 
the years of bonnet-showing and servile words that 
these women have lived through. We have seen Degas 
do this before — it is a welcome repetition of a family 
note, but it is not until we turn to the set of nude 
figures that we find the great artist revealing any new 
phrase of his talent. The first, in an attitude which 
suggests the kneeling Venus, washes her thighs in a tin 
bath. The second, a back view, full of the malforma- 
tions of forty years, of children, of hard work, stands 
gripping her flanks with both hands. The naked woman 
has become impossible in modern art ; it required 
Degas' genius to infuse new life into the worn-out theme. 
Cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the mid- 
dle ages, and with cynicism Degas has rendered the nude 
again an artistic possibility. What Mr. Horsley or the 
British matron would say it is difficult to guess. Perhaps 
the hideousness depicted by M. Degas would frighten 
them more than the sensuality which they condemn in Sir 
Frederick Leighton. But, be this as it may, it is certain 
that the great, fat, short-legged creature, who in her hum- 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 31 

ble and touching ugliness passes a chemise over her 
lumpy shoulders, is a triumph of art. Ugliness is trivial, 
the monstrous is terrible ; Velasquez knew this when he 
painted his dwarfs. 

Pissarro exhibited a group of girls gathering apples in 
a garden — sad grays and violets beautifully harmonized. 
The figures seem to move as in a dream : we are on the 
thither side of life, in a world of quiet color and happy as- 
piration. Those apples will never fall from the branches, 
those baskets that the stooping girls are filling will never 
be filled : that garden is the garden of the peace that life 
has not for giving, but which the painter has set in an 
eternal dream of violet and gray. 

Madame Morizot exhibited a series of delicate fancies. 
Here are two young girls ; the sweet atmosphere folds 
them as with a veil; they are all summer ; their dreams 
are limitlessness, their days are fading, and their ideas 
follow the flight of the -white butterflies through the 
standard roses. Take note, too, of the stand of fans ; 
what delicious fancies are there — willows, balconies, 
gardens, and terraces. 

Then, contrasting with these distant tendernesses, 
there was the vigorous painting of Guillaumin. There 
life is rendered in violent and colorful brutality. The 
ladies fishing in the park, with the violet of the skies and 
the green of the trees descending upon them, is a chef 
rfauvre. Nature seems to be closing about them like a 
tomb ; and that hillside, — sunset flooding the skies with 
yellow and the earth with blue shadow, — is another piece 
of painting that will one day find a place in one of the 
public galleries ; and the same can be said of the por- 
trait of the woman on a background of chintz flowers. 

We could but utter coarse gibes and exclaim, " What 



32 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

could have induced him to paint such things ? Surely he 
must have seen that it was absurd. I wonder if the Im- 
pressionists are in earnest or if it is only une blague quon 
nous fait? " Then we stood and screamed at Monet, that 
most exquisite painter of blonde light. We stood before 
the " Turkeys," and seriously we wondered if " it was 
serious work," — that chef aVceuvre ! the high grass that 
the turkeys are gobbling is flooded with sunlight so swift 
and intense that for a moment the illusion is complete. 
" Just look at the house! Why, the turkeys couldn't walk 
in at the door. The perspective is all wrong." Then 
followed other remarks of an educational kind ; and 
when we came to those piercingly personal visions of rail- 
way stations by the same painter, — those rapid sensa- 
tions of steel and vapor, — our laughter knew no bounds. 
" I say, Marshall, just look at this wheel ; he dipped his 
brush into cadmium yellow and whisked it round, that's 
all." Nor did we understand any more Renoir's rich 
sensualities of tone; nor did the mastery with which he 
achieves an absence of shadow appeal to us. You see 
color and light in his pictures as you do in nature, and 
the child's criticism of a portrait — " Why is one side of 
the face black ? " is answered. There was a half-length 
nude figure of a girl. How the round, fresh breasts 
palpitate in the light ! such a glorious glow of whiteness 
was attained never before. But we saw nothing except 
that the eyes were out of drawing. 

For art was not for us then as it is now, — a mere 
emotion, right or wrong only in proportion to its inten- 
sity ; we believed then in the grammar of art, perspective, 
anatomy and lajambe qui porte ; and we found all this 
in Julien's studio. 

A year passed ; a year of art and dissipation — one part 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 33 

art, two parts dissipation. We mounted and descended 
at pleasure the rounds of society's ladder. One evening 
we would spend at Constant's, Rue de la Gaiet£, in the 
company of thieves and housebreakers ; on the following 
evening we were dining with a duchess or a princess in 
the Champs Elysees. And we prided ourselves vastly 
on our versatility in using with equal facility the lan- 
guage of the " fence's " parlor, and that of the literary 
salon ; on being able to appear as much at home in one 
as in the other. Delighted at our prowess, we often 
whispered, " The princess, I swear, would not believe 
her eyes if she saw us now "; and then in terrible slang 
we shouted a benediction on some " crib " that was going 
to be broken into that evening. And we thought there 
was something very thrilling in leaving the Rue de la 
Gaiete, returning home to dress, and presenting our 
spotless selves to the Mite. And we succeeded very well, 
as indeed all young men do who waltz perfectly and 
avoid making love to the wrong woman. 

But the excitement of climbing up and down the so- 
cial ladder did not stave off our craving for art ; and 
there came about this time a very decisive event in our 
lives. Marshall's last and really grande passion had come 
to a violent termination, and monetary difficulties forced 
him to turn his thoughts to painting as a means of liveli- 
hood. This decided me. I asked him to come and li^e 
with me, and to be as near our studio as possible, I took 
an appdrtement in the Passage des Panoramas. It was 
not pleasant that your window should open, not to the 
sky, but to an unclean prospect of glass roofing ; nor 
was it agreeable to get up at seven in the morning ; and 
ten hours of work daily are trying to the resolution even 
of the best intended. But we had sworn to forego all 



34 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

pleasures for the sake of art — tables d'hote in the Rue 
Maubeuge, French and foreign duchesses in the Champs 
Elysees, thieves in the Rue de la Gaiete. 

I was entering therefore on a duel with Marshall for 
supremacy in an art for which, as has already been said, 
I possessed no qualifications. It will be readily under- 
stood how a mind like mine, so keenly alive to all im- 
pulses, and so unsupported by any moral convictions, 
would suffer in so keen a contest waged under such un- 
equal and cruel conditions. It was in truth a year of 
great passion and great despair. Defeat is bitter when 
it comes swiftly and conclusively, but when defeat falls 
by inches like the fatal pendulum in the pit, the agony 
is a little out of reach of words to define. It was 
even so. I remember the first day of my martyrdom. 
The clocks were striking eight ; we chose our places, 
got into position. After the first hour, I compared my 
drawing with Marshall's. He had, it is true, caught the 
movement of the figure better than I, but the character 
and the quality of his work were miserable. That of mine 
was not. I have said I possessed no artistic facility, but 
I did not say faculty ; my drawing was never common ; 
it was individual in feeling ; it was refined. I possessed 
all the rarer qualities, but not that primary power with- 
out which all is valueless, — I mean the talent of the boy 
who can knock off a clever caricature of his schoolmaster 
or make a lifelike sketch of his favorite horse on the barn 
door with a piece of chalk. 

The following week Marshall made a great deal of 
progress ; I thought the model did not suit me, and 
hoped for better luck next time. That time never came, 
and at the end of the first month I was left toiling hope- 
lesslv in the distance. Marshall's mind, though shallow, 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 35 

was bright, and he understood with strange ease all that 
was told him, and was able to put into immediate prac- 
tice the methods of work inculcated by the professors. 
In fact he showed himself singularly capable of educa- 
tion ; little could be drawn out, but a great deal could be 
put in (using the word in its modern, not in its original 
sense). He showed himself intensely anxious to learn 
and to accept all that was said : the ideas and feelings 
of others ran into him like water into a bottle whose 
neck is suddenly stooped below the surface of the stream. 
He was an ideal pupil. It was Marshall here, it was 
Marshall there, and soon the studio was little but an agi- 
tation in praise of him and his work, and anxious specu- 
lation arose as to the medals he would obtain. I con- 
tinued the struggle for nine months. I was in the studio 
at eight in the morning ; I measured my drawing ; I 
plumbed it throughout ; I sketched in, having regard to 
la jambe qui porte j I modelled par les masses. During 
breakfast I considered how I should work during the 
afternoon ; at night I lay awake thinking of what I 
might do to attain a better result. But my efforts 
availed me nothing ; it was like one who, falling, stretches 
his arms for help and grasps the yielding air. How ter- 
rible are the languors and yearning of impotence ! how 
wearing ! what an aching void they leave in the heart ! 
And all this I suffered until the burden of unachieved 
desire grew intolerable. 

I laid down my charcoal and said, " I will never draw 
or paint again." That vow I have kept. 

Surrender brought relief, but my life seemed at an 
end. I looked upon a blank space of years desolate as a 
gray and sail-less sea. " What shall I do ? " I asked my- 
self, and my heart was weary and hopeless. Litera- 



36 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

ture ? My heart did not answer the question at once. 
I was too broken and overcome by the shock of failure ; 
failure precise and stern, admitting of no equivocation. 
I strove to read ; but it was impossible to sit at home 
almost within earshot of the studio, and with all the 
memories of defeat still ringing their knells in my heart. 
Marshall's success clamored loudly from without ; every 
day, almost every hour of the day, I heard of the medals 
which he would carry off ; of what Lefevre thought of 
his drawing this week, of Boulanger's opinion of his tal- 
ent. I do not wish to excuse my conduct, but I cannot 
help saying that Marshall showed me neither considera- 
tion nor pity ; he did not even seem to understand that 
I was suffering, that my nerves had been terribly shaken, 
and he flaunted his superiority relentlessly in my face — 
his good looks, his talents, his popularity. I did not 
know then how little these studio successes really meant. 
Vanity ? No, it was not his vanity that maddened me ; 
to me vanity is rarely displeasing, sometimes it is sin- 
gularly attractive ; but by a certain insistence and aggres- 
siveness in the details of life he allowed me to feel that 
I was only a means for the moment, a serviceable thing 
enough, but one that would be very soon discarded and 
passed over. This was intolerable. I broke up my es- 
tablishment. By so doing I involved my friend in grave 
and cruel difficulties ; by this action I imperilled his fu- 
ture prospects. It was a dastardly action ; but his pres- 
ence had grown unbearable ; yes, unbearable in the full- 
est acceptation of the word, and in ridding myself of him 
I felt as if a world of misery were being lifted from me. 



CHAPTER IV. 

AFTER three months spent in a sweet seaside resort, 
where unoccupied men and ladies whose husbands 
are abroad happily congregate, I returned to Paris re- 
freshed. 

Marshall and I were no longer on speaking terms, but 
I saw him daily, in a new overcoat, of a cut admirably 
adapted to his figure, sweeping past the fans and the jet 
ornaments of the Passage des Panoramas. The coat 
interested me, and I remembered that if I had not broken 
with him I should have been able to ask him some essen- 
tial questions concerning it. Of such trifles as this the 
sincerest friendships are made ; he was as necessary to 
me as I to him, and after some demur on his part a 
reconciliation was effected. 

Then I took an appartement in one of the old houses in 
Rue de la Tour des Dames, for the windows there over- 
looked a bit of tangled garden with a few dilapidated 
statues. It was Marshall of course who undertook the 
task of furnishing, and he lavished on the rooms the 
fancies of an imagination that suggested the collabora- 
tion of a courtesan of high degree and a fifth-rate artist. 
Nevertheless, our salon was a pretty resort — English 
cretonne of a very happy design — vine leaves, dark green 
and golden, broken up by many fluttering jays. The 
walls were stretched with this colorful cloth, and the 
arm-chairs and the couches were to match. The draw- 
ing-room was in cardinal red, hung from the middle of 

37 



38 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

the ceiling and looped up to give the appearance of a 
tent ; a faun, in terra cotta, laughed in the red gloom, 
and there were Turkish couches and lamps. In another 
room you faced an altar, a Buddhist temple, a statue of 
the Apollo, and a bust of Shelley. The bedrooms were 
made unconventional with cushioned seats and rich can- 
opies ; and in picturesque corners there were censers, 
great church candlesticks, and palms ; then think of the 
smell of burning incense and wax and you will have 
imagined the sentiment of our apartment in Rue de la 
Tour des Dames. I bought a Persian cat, and a python 
that made a monthly meal off guinea-pigs ; Marshall, who 
did not care for pets, filled his rooms with flowers — he 
used to sleep beneath a tree of gardenias in full bloom. 
We were so, Henry Marshall and Edwin Dayne, when 
we went to live in 76 Rue de la Tour des Dames, we 
hoped for the rest of our lives. He was to paint, I was 
to write. 

Before leaving for the seaside I had bought some 
volumes of Hugo and De Musset ; but in pleasant, sunny 
Boulogne poetry went flat, and it was not until I got 
into my new rooms that I began to read seriously. 
Books are like individuals ; you know at once if they 
are going to create a sense within the sense, to fever, to 
madden you in blood and brain, or if they will merely 
leave you indifferent, or irritable, having unpleasantly 
disturbed sweet intimate musings as might a draught 
from an open window. Many are the reasons for love, 
but I confess I only love woman or book, when it is as a 
v'oice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, 
a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This 
announces feminine depravities in my affections. I am 
feminine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse. 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 39 

almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me. 
Wordsworth is the only simple-minded man I ever loved, 
if that great austere mind, chill even as the Cumberland 
year, can be called simple. But Hugo is not perverse, 
nor even personal. Reading him was like being in 
church with a strident-voiced preacher shouting from 
out of a terribly sonorous pulpit. " Les Orientales." — 
An East of painted card-board, tin daggers, and a mili- 
tary band playing the " Turkish Patrol " in the Palais 
Royal. The verse is grand, noble, tremendous ; I liked 
it, I admired it, but it did not — I repeat the phrase — 
awake a voice of conscience within me ; and even the 
structure of the verse was too much in the style of pub- 
lic buildings to please me. Of "Les Feuillesd'Automne" 
and " Les Chants du Crepuscule " I remember nothing. 
Ten lines, fifty lines of " La Legende des Siecles," and 
I always think that it is the greatest poetry I have ever 
read, but after a few pages I invariably put the book 
down and forget it. Having composed more verses than 
any man that ever lived, Hugo can only be taken in the 
smallest doses ; if you repeat any passage to a friend 
across a cafe table, you are both appalled by the splen- 
dor of the imagery, by the thunder of the syllables : 

" Quel dieu, quel moissonneur dans l'eternel ete 
Avait s'en allant negligemment jete 
Cette faucille dor dans les champs des etoiles." 

But if I read an entire poem I never escape that sensa- 
tion of the ennui which is inherent in gaud and the 
glitter of the Italian or Spanish improvisatore. There 
never was anything French about Hugo's genius. Hugo 
was a cross between an Italian improvisatore and a meta- 
physical German student. Take another verse — 
" Le clair de lune bleu qui baigne l'horizon." 



40 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

Without a "like" or an "as," by a mere statement of 
fact, the picture, nay more, the impression, is produced. 
I confess I have a weakness for the poem which this 
line concludes — " La fete chez Therese "; but admirable 
as it is with its picture of mediaeval life, there is in it, 
like in all Hugo's work, a sense of fabrication that dries 
up emotion in my heart. He shouts and raves over 
poor humanity, while he is gathering coppers for him- 
self ; he goes in for an all-round patronage of the Al- 
mighty in a last stanza ; but of the two immortalities he 
evidently considers his own the most durable ; he does 
not, however, become really intolerable until he gets on 
the subject of little children ; he sings their innocence 
in great bombast, but he is watching them ; the poetry 
over, the crowd dispersed, he will appear a veritable 
Mr. Hyde. 

The first time I read of une bouche cC ombre I was as- 
tonished, nor the second nor third repetition produced a 
change in my mood of mind ; but sooner or later it was 
impossible to avoid conviction that of the two "the 
rosy fingers of the dawn," although some three thousand 
years older, was younger, truer, and more beautiful. 
Homer's simile's can never grow old ; une bouche d'ombre 
was old the first time it was said. It is the birthplace 
and the grave of Hugo's genius. 

Of Alfred de Musset I had heard a great deal. Mar- 
shall and the Marquise were in the habit of reading him 
in moments of relaxation, they had marked their favor- 
ite passages, so he came to me highly recommended. 
Nevertheless, I made but little progress in his poetry. 
His modernisms were out of tune with the present strain 
of my aspirations, and I did not find the unexpected 
word and the eccentricities of expression which were, 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 41 

and are still, so dear to me. I am not a purist ; an 
error of diction is very pardonable if it does not err on 
the side of the commonplace ; the commonplace, the nat- 
ural, is constitutionally abhorrent to me ; and I have never 
been able to read with any very thorough sense of pleasure 
even the opening lines of " Rolla," that splendid lyrical out- 
burst. What I remember of it now are those two odious 
chevilles — marchait et respirait, and Astarti ' fille de Vonde 
amere ; nor does the fact that amere rhymes with mere con- 
done the offence, although it proves that even Musset felt 
that perhaps the richness of the rhyme might render toler- 
able the intolerable. And it is to my credit that the Span- 
ish love-songs moved me not at all ; and it was not until I 
read that magnificently grotesque poem " La Ballade a 
la Lune," that I could be induced to bend the knee and 
acknowledge Musset a poet. 

I still read and spoke of Shelley with a rapture of 
joy — he was still my soul. But this craft, fashioned of 
mother-o'-pearl, with starlight at the helm and moon- 
beams for sails, suddenly ran on a reef and went down, not 
out of sight, but out of the agitation of actual life. The 
reef was Gautier ; I read " Mile, de Maupin." The 
reaction was as violent as it was sudden. I was weary 
of spiritual passion, and this great exaltation of the body 
above the soul at once conquered and led me captive ; 
this plain scorn of a world as exemplified in lacerated 
saints and a crucified Redeemer opened up to me illim- 
itable prospects of fresh" beliefs, and therefore new joys 
in things and new revolts against all that had come to 
form part and parcel of the commonalty of mankind. 
Till now I had not even remotely suspected that a deifi- 
cation of flesh and fleshly desire was possible. Shelley's 
teaching had been, while accepting the body, to dream 



42 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

of the soul as a star, and so preserve our ideal ; but now 
suddenly I saw, with delightful clearness and with in- 
toxicating conviction, that by looking without shame and 
accepting with love the flesh, I might raise it to as high 
a place and within as divine a light as even the soul had 
been set in. The ages were as an aureole, and I stood 
as if enchanted before the noble nakedness of the elder 
gods ; not the infamous nudity that sex has preserved 
in this modern world, but the clean pagan nude, — a love 
of life and beauty, the broad fair breast of a boy, the 
long flanks, the head thrown back ; the bold, fearless 
gaze of Venus is lovelier than the lowered glance of the 
Virgin, and I cried with my master that the blood that 
flowed upon Mount Calvary " ne m'a jamais baignt dans 
ses flots" 

I will not turn to the book to find the exact words of 
this sublime vindication, for ten years I have not read 
the Word that has become so inexpressibly a part of me ; 
and shall I not refrain as Mile, de Maupin refrained, 
knowing well that the face of love may not be twice 
seen ? Great was my conversion. None more than I 
had cherished mystery and dream ; my life until now 
had been but a mist which revealed, as each cloud 
wreathed and went out, the red of some strange flower 
or some tall peak, blue and snowy and fairylike in lonely 
moonlight ; and now so great was my conversion that 
the more brutal the outrage offered to my ancient ideal, 
the rarer and keener was my delight. I read almost 
without fear : " My dreams were of naked youths riding 
white horses through mountain passes ; there were no 
clouds in my dreams, or if there were any, they were 
clouds that had been cut out as if in cardboard with a 
pair of scissors." 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 43 

I had shaken off all belief in Christianity early in life, 
and had suffered much. Shelley had replaced faith by 
reason, but I still suffered : but here was a new creed 
which proclaimed the divinity of the body, and for a long 
time the reconstruction of all my theories of life on a purely 
pagan basis occupied my whole attention. The exquisite 
outlines of the marvellous castle, the romantic woods, 
the horses moving, the lovers leaning to each other's 
faces, enchanted me ; and then the indescribably beauti- 
ful description of the performance of " As You Like 
It," and the supreme relief and perfect assuagement it 
brings to Rodolph, who then sees Mile, de Maupin for 
the first time in woman's attire. If she were dangerously 
beautiful as a man, that beauty is forgotten in the rapture 
and praise of her unmatchable woman's loveliness. 

But if Mile, de Maupin was the highest peak, it was 
not the entire mountain. The range was long, and each 
summit offered to the eye a new and delightful prospect. 
There were the numerous tales, — tales as perfect as the 
world has ever seen : " La Morte Amoureuse," " Jetta- 
tura," " Une Nuit de Cleopatre," etc., and then the very 
diamonds of the crown, " Les Emaux et Camees," " La 
Symphonie en Blanc Majeure," in which the adjective 
blanc and blanche is repeated with miraculous felicity in 
each stanza. And then Contralto, — 

" Mais seulement il se transpose 
Et passant de la forme au son, 
Trouvant dans la metamorphose 
La jeune fille et le gar9on." 

Transpose, — a word never before used except in musi- 
cal appliction, and now for the first time applied to mate- 
rial form, and with a beauty-giving touch that Phidias 
might be proud of. I know not how I quote : such is my 



44 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

best memory of the stanza, and here that is more impor- 
tant than the stanza itself. And that other stanza, " The 
Chatelaine and the Page "; and that other " The Doves "; 
and that other, " Romeo and Juliet," and the exquisite 
cadence of the line ending "balcon" Novelists have often 
shown how a love passion brings misery, death, and 
ruin upon a life, but I know of no story of the good or 
evil influence awakened by the chance reading of a book, 
the chain of consequences so far-reaching, so intensely 
dramatic. Never shall I open these books again, but 
were I to live for a thousand years their power in my 
soul would remain unshaken. I am what they made me. 
Belief in humanity, pity for the poor, hatred of injustice, 
all that Shelley gave may never have been very deep or 
earnest ; but I did lcve, I did believe. Gautier des- 
troyed these illusions. He taught me that our boasted 
progress is but a pitfall into which the race is falling, 
and I learned that the correction of form is the highest 
ideal, and I accepted the plain, simple conscience of the 
pagan world as the perfect solution of the problem that 
had vexed me so long : I cried, " ave " to it all, lust, 
cruelty, slavery, and I would have held down my thumbs 
in the Colosseum that a hundred gladiators might die 
and wash me free of my Christian soul with their blood. 
The study of Baudelaire aggravated the course of the 
disease. No longer is it the grand barbaric face of 
Gautier ; now it is the clean-shaven face of the mock 
priest, the slow, cold eyes and the sharp, cunning sneers 
of the cynical libertine who will be tempted that he may 
better know the worthlessness of temptation. " Les Fleurs 
du Mai ! " beautiful flowers, beautiful in sublime decay. 
What great record is yours, and were Hell a reality how 
many souls would we find wreathed with your poisonous 



CONFESSIONS OF a YOUNG MAN. 45 

blossoms ! The village maiden goes to her Faust ; the 
children of the nineteenth century go to you, O Baude- 
laire, and having tasted of your deadly delight all hope 
of repentance is vain. Flowers, beautiful in your sublime 
decay, I press you to my lips ; these northern solitudes, 
far from the rank Parisian garden where I gathered you, 
are full of you, even as the sea-shell of the sea, and the 
sun that sets on this wild moorland evokes the magical 
verse: 

" Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique 
Nous e'changerons un eclair unique 
Comme un long sanglot tout charge d'adieux." 

For months I fed on the mad and morbid literature 
that the enthusiasm of 1830 called into existence. The 
gloomy and sterile little pictures of " Gaspard de la 
Nuit," or the elaborate criminality, " Les Contes Im- 
moraux," laboriously invented lifeless things with creaky 
joints, pitiful lay figures that fall to dust as soon as the 
book is closed, and in the dust only the figures of the 
terrible ferryman and the unfortunate Dora remain. 
" Madame Potiphar " cost me forty francs, and I never 
read more than a few pages. 

Like a pike after minnows, I pursued the works of 
Les Jeune France along the quays and through every 
passage in Paris. The money spent was considerable, 
the waste of time enormous. One man's solitary work 
(he died very young, but he is known to have excelled 
all in length of his hair and the redness of his waist- 
coats) resisted my efforts to capture it. At last I caught 
sight of the precious volume in a shop on the Quai Vol- 
taire. Trembling I asked the price. The man looked 
at me earnestly and answered, " A hundred and fifty 



46 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

francs." No doubt it was a great deal of money, but I 
paid it, and rushed home to read. Many that had gone 
before had proved disappointing, and I was obliged to 
admit had contributed little towards my intellectual ad- 
vancement ; but this — this that I had heard about so 
long — not a queer phrase, not an outrage of any sort of 
kind, not even a new blasphemy, nothing, — that is to say, 
nothing but a hundred and fifty francs. Having thus 
rudely, and very pikelike, knocked my nose against the 
bottom — this book was, most assuredly, the bottom of 
the literature of 1830 — I came up to the surface and 
began to look around my contemporaries for something 
to read. 

I have remarked before on the instinctiveness of my 
likes and dislikes, on my susceptibility to the sound of 
and even to the appearance of a name upon paper. I 
was repelled by Leconte de Lisle from the first, and it 
was only by a very deliberate outrage to my feelings 
that I bought and read " Les Poemes Antiques," and 
" Les Poemes Barbares"; I was deceived in nothing, 
all I had anticipated I found — long, desolate boredom. 
Leconte de Lisle produces on me the effect of a walk 
through the new Law Courts, with a steady but not violent 
draught sweeping from end to end. Oh, the vile old 
professor of rhetoric ! and when I saw him the last time 
I was in Paris, his head — a declaration of righteousness, 
a cross between a Caesar by Gerome, and an archbishop 
of a provincial town, set all my natural antipathy instantly 
on edge. Hugo is often pompous, shallow, empty, un- 
real, but he is at least an artist, and when he thinks of 
the artist and forgets the prophet, as in " Les Chansons 
des Rues et des Bois," his juggling with the verse is 
magnificent, superb. 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 4} 

"Comrae un geai sur l'arbre 
Le roi se tient fier ; 
Son coeur est de marbre, 
Son ventre est de chair. 

On a pour sa nuque 

Et son front vermeil 
Fait une perruque 

Avec le soleil. 

: i II regne, il vegete 
Effroyable zero ; 
Sur lui se projette 
L'ombre du bourreau. 

' ' Son trone est une tombe, 
Et sur le pave 
Quelque chose en tombe 
Qu'on n'a point lave." 

But how to get the first line of the last stanza into five 
syllables I cannot think. If ever I meet with the volume 
again I will look it out and see how that rude dompteur 
de syllables managed it. But stay, son trdne est la tombe ; 
that makes the verse, and the generalization would be in 
the "line" of Hugo. Hugo — how impossible it is to 
speak of French literature without referring to him. 
Let these, however, be the concluding words : he thought 
that by saying everything, and saying everything twenty 
times over, he would for ever render impossible the ad- 
vent of another great poet. But a work of art is valu- 
able and pleasurable in proportion to its rarity ; one 
beautiful book of verses is better than twenty books of 
beautiful verses. This is an absolute and incontestable 
truth ; a child can burlesque this truth — one verse is 
better than the whole poem ; a word is better than the 
line : a letter is better than the word ; but the truth is 



4$ CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

not thereby affected. Hugo never had the good fortune 
to write a bad book, nor even a single bad line, so not 
having time to read all, the future will read none. What 
immortality would be gained by the destruction of one 
half of his magnificent works ! what oblivion is secured 
by the publication of these posthumous volumes ! 

To return to the Leconte de Lisle. See his " Discours 
de Reception." Is it possible to imagine anything more 
absurdly arid ? Rhetoric of this sort, " des vers dor sur 
une e'cume d'airain" and such sententious platitudes 
(speaking of the realists), " Les epid/mies de cette nature 
passent, et le genie demeure." 

Theodore de Banville. At first I thought him cold, 
tinged with the rhetorical ice of the Leconte de Lisle. 
He had no new creed to proclaim nor old creed to de- 
noounce, the inherent miseries of human life did not 
seem to touch him, and of the languors and ardors of 
animal or spiritual passion there are none. What is 
there ? A pure, clear song, an instinctive, incurable and 
lark-like love of the song. The lily is white, and the 
rose is red, — such knowledge of, such observation of 
nature is enough for the poet, and he sings and he trills, 
there is silver magic in every note, and the song as it 
ascends rings, and all the air quivers with the everwiden- 
ing circle of the echoes, sighing and dying out of the 
ear until the last faintness is reached, and the glad 
rhymes clash and dash forth again on their aerial way. 
Banville is not the poet, he is the bard. The great 
questions that agitate the mind of man have not troubled 
him ; life, death, and love he only perceives as stalks 
whereon he may weave his glittering web of living words. 
Whatever his moods may be, he is lyrical. His wit flies 
out on clear-cut, swallow-like wings as when he said, in 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 49 

speaking of Paul Alexis' book " Le Besoin d'Aimer," 
" Vous avez trouvez un titre assez laid pour f aire reader 
les divines /toiles." I know not what instrument to com- 
pare with his verse. I suppose I should say a flute ; but 
it seems to me more like a marvellously toned piano. 
His hands pass over the keys, and he produces Chopin- 
like music. 

It is now well known that French verse is not seventy 
years old. If it was Hugo who invented French rhyme, 
it was Banville who broke up the couplet. Hugo had 
perhaps ventured to place the pause between the adjec- 
tive and its noun, but it was not until Banville wrote the 
line, " Elle filait pensivement la blanche laine" that the 
caesura received its final coup de grace. This verse has 
been probably more imitated than any other verse in the 
French language. Pensivement was replaced by some 
similar four-syllable adverb, Elle tirait nonchalamment les 
bas de sole, etc. It was the beginning of the end. 

I read the French poets of the modern school — Cop- 
pee, Mendes, Leon Diex, Verlaine, Jose Maria Here- 
dia, Mallarme, Rechepin, Villiers de l'lsle Adam. Cop- 
pee, as may be imagined, I only was capable of appre- 
ciating in his first manner, when he wrote those exquisite 
but purely artistic sonnets " La Tulipe " and " Le Lys." 
In the latter a room decorated with daggers, armor, 
jewelry, and china is beautifully described, and it is only 
in the last line that the lily which animates and gives 
life to the whole is introduced. But the exquisite poetic 
perceptivity Copp£e showed in his modern poems, the 
certainty with which he raised the commonest subject, 
investing it with sufficient dignity for his purpose, es- 
caped me wholly, and I could not but turn with horror 
from such poems as " La Nourrice " and " Le Petit Epi- 



50 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

cier." How any one could bring himself to acknowledge 
the vulgar details of our vulgar age I could not under- 
stand. The fiery glory of Jose Maria de Heredia, on 
the contrary, filled me with enthusiasm — ruins and sand, 
shadow and silhouette of palms and pillars, negroes, 
crimson, swords, silence, and arabesques. As great 
copper pans go the clangor of the rhymes : 

' ' Entre le ciel qui brule et la mer qui moutonne, 
Au somnolent soleil d'un midi monotone, 
Tu songes, O guerriere, aux vieux conquistadors ; 
Et dans l'enervement des nuits chaudes et calmes, 
Bergant ta gloire eteinte, O cite, tu t'endors 
Sous les palmiers, au long fremissement des palmes." 

Catulle Mendes, a perfect realization of his name, of 
his pale hair, of his fragile face illuminated with the 
idealism of a depraved woman. He takes you by the 
arm, by the hand, he leans towards you, his words are 
caresses, his fervor is delightful, and listening to him 
is as sweet as drinking a fair perfumed white wine. All 
he says is false — the book he has just read, the play he 
is writing, the woman who loves him, — he buys a 
packet of bonbons in the streets and eats them, and it 
is false. An exquisite artist ; physically and spiritually 
he is art ; he is the muse herself, or rather he is one of 
the minions of the muse. Passing from flower to flower 
he goes, his whole nature pulsing with butterfly voluptu- 
ousness. He has written poems as good as Hugo, as 
good as Leconte de Lisle, as good as Banville, as good 
as Baudelaire, as good as Gautier, as good as Coppee ; 
he never wrote an ugly line in his life, but he never 
wrote a line that some one of his brilliant contem- 
poraries might not have written. He has produced 
good work of all kinds, " et voila tout." Every genera- 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 5 1 

tion, every country, has its Catulle Mendes. Robert 
Buchanan is ours, only in the adaptation Scotch gruel 
has been substituted for perfumed white wine. No more 
delightful talker than Mendes, no more accomplished 
litterateur, no more fluent and translucid critic. I re- 
member the great moonlights of the Place Pigale, when, 
on leaving the cafe, he would take me by the arm, and 
expound Hugo's or Zola's last book, thinking as he 
spoke of the Greek sophists. There were for contrast 
Mallarme's Tuesday evenings, a few friends sitting round 
the hearth, the lamp on the table. I have met none 
whose conversation was more fruitful, but with the ex- 
ception of his early verses I cannot say I ever frankly 
enjoyed his poetry. When I knew him he had pub- 
lished the celebrated " L'Apres Midi d'un Faun " : the 
first poem written in accordance with the theory of 
symbolism. But when it was given to me (this mar- 
vellous brochure furnished with strange illustrations and 
wonderful tassels), I thought it absurdly obscure. Since 
then, however, it has been rendered, by force of contrast 
with the brain-curdling enigmas the author has since 
published, a marvel of lucidity ; and were I to read it 
now I should appreciate its many beauties. It bears 
the same relation to the author's later work as Rienzi 
to The Walkyrie. But what is symbolism ? Vulgarly 
speaking, saying the opposite to what you mean. 
For example, you want to say that music, which 
is the new art, is replacing the old art, which 
is poetry. First symbol : a house in which there is 
a funeral, the pall extends over the furniture. The 
house is poetry, poetry is dead. Second symbol : " notre 
vieux grimoire*' grimoire is the parchment, parch- 
ment is used for writing, therefore, grimoire is the 



52 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

symbol for literature, " tfou s'exaltent les milliers" thou- 
sands of what ? of letters of course. We have heard a 
great deal in England of Browning's obscurity. The 
" Red Cotton Nightcap Country " is child's play com- 
pared to a sonnet by a determined symbolist such as 
Mallarme, or better still his disciple Ghil, who has added 
to the difficulties of symbolism those of poetic instru- 
mentation. For according to M. Ghil and his organ 
Les Ecrits pour l'Art, it would appear that the syllables 
of the French language evoke in us the sensations of 
different colors ; consequently the timbre of different 
instruments. The vowel u corresponds to the color 
yellow, and therefore to the sound of flutes. 

Arthur Rimbaud was, it is true, first in the field with 
these pleasant and genial theories ; but M. Ghil informs 
us that Rimbaud was mistaken in many things, particu- 
larly in coupling the sound of the vowel u with the color 
green instead of with the color yellow. M. Ghil has 
corrected this very stupid blunder and many others : 
and his instrumentation in his last volume, " Le Geste 
Ingenu," may be considered as complete and definitive. 
The work is dedicated to Mallarme, " Pere et seigneur 
des ors, des pierreries, et des poissons," and other works 
are to follow : the six tomes of " Legendes de Reves et 
de Sangs," the innumerable tomes of " Legendes de 
Sangs, the innumerable tomes of " La Glose," and the 
single tome of " La Loi." 

And that man Gustave Kahn, who takes the French 
language as a violin, and lets the bow of his emotion run 
at wild will upon it, producing strange acute strains, un- 
premeditated harmonies comparable "to nothing that I 
know of but some Hungarian rapsody ; verses of seven- 
teen syllables interwoven with verses of eight, and even 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 53 

nine, masculine rhymes, seeking strange union with 
feminine rhymes in the middle of the line— a music 
sweet, subtle, and epicene ; the half-note, the inflection, 
but not the full tone, as " se fondre, o souvenir •, des lys 
acres delices" 

Se penchant vers les dahlias, 
Des paons cabrient des rosace lunaire 
L'assoupissement des branches venere 
Son pale visage aux mourants dahlias. 

Elle ecoute au lion les breves musiques 
Nuit claire aux ramures d'accords, 
Et la lassitude a berce son corps 
Au rhythme odorant des pures musiques. 

Les paons ont dresse la rampe occellee 
Pour la descente de ses yeux vers le tapis 

De choses et de sens 
Qui va vers l'horizon, parure vemiculee 

De son corps alangui 

En ame se tapit 
Le flou desir molli de recits et d'encens. 

I laughed at these verbal eccentricities, but they were 
not without their effect, and that effect was a demoral- 
izing one ; for in me they aggravated the fever of the 
unknown, and whetted my appetite for the strange, ab- 
normal and unhealthy in art. Hence all pallidities of 
thought and desire were eagerly welcomed, and Ver- 
laine became my poet. Never shall I forget the first en- 
chantment of " Les Fetes Galantes." Here all is twi- 
light. 

The royal magnificences of the sunset have passed, the 
solemn beatitude of the night is at hand but not yet 
here ; the ways are veiled with shadow, and lit with 
dresses, white, that the hour has touched with blue, 



54 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

yellow, green, mauve, and undecided purple ; the voices ? 
strange contraltos ; the forms ? not those of men or 
women, but mystic, hybrid creatures, with hands nerv- 
ous and pale, and eyes charged with eager and fitful 
light . . . " un soir equivoque d'automne" . . . "les 
belles pendent reveuses a nos bras . . . and they whisper 
" les mots spe'ciaux et tout bas." 

Gautier sang to his antique lyre praise of the flesh 
and contempt of the soul : Baudelaire on a mediaeval 
organ chanted his unbelief in goodness and truth and his 
hatred of life. But Verlaine advances one step further ; 
hate is to him as commonplace as love, unfaith as vulgar 
as faith. The world is merely a doll to be attired to-day 
in a modern ball dress, to-morrow in aureoles and stars. 
The Virgin is a pretty thing, worth a poem, but it would 
be quite too silly to talk about belief or unbelief ; Christ 
in wood or plaster we have heard too much of, but Christ 
in painted glass amid crosiers and Latin terminations is 
an amusing subject for poetry. And strangely enough, 
a withdrawing from all commerce with virtue and vice 
is, it would seem, a licentiousness more curiously subtle 
and penetrating than any other ; and the licentiousness 
of the verse is equal to that of emotion ; every natural 
instinct of the language is violated, and the simple music 
native in French metre is replaced by falsetto notes 
sharp and intense. The charm is that of an odor of iris 
exhaled by some ideal tissues, or of a missal in a gold 
case, a precious relic of the pomp and ritual of an arch- 
bishop of Persepolis. 

Parsifal a vaincu les filles, leur gentil 
Babil et la luxure amusante et sa pente 
Vers la chair de ce garcon vierge que cela tente 
D'aimer des seins legers et ce gentil babil. 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 55 

II a vaincu la femme belle au cceur subtil 
Etalant ces bras frais et sa gorge excitante ; 
II a vaincu l'enfer, il rentre dans sa tente 
Avec un lourd trophee a son bras pueril. 

Avec la lance qui perca le flanc supreme 
II a gueri le roi, le voici roi lui-meme, 
Et pretre du tres-saint tresor essentiel ; 

En robe d'or il adore, gloire et symbole, 

Le vase pur ou resplendit le sang reel, 

Et, o ces voix d'enfants chantent dans la coupole. 

I know of no more perfect thing than this sonnet. 
The hiatus in the last line was at first a little trying, but 
I have learned to love it ; not in Baudelaire nor even in 
Poe is there more beautiful poetry to be found. Poe, 
unread and ill-understood in America and England, 
here thou art an integral part of our artistic life. 

The Island o' Fay, Silence, Eleonore, were the familiar 
spirits of an apartment beautiful with tapestry and 
palms ; Swinburne and Rossetti were the English poets 
I read there ; and in a golden bondage, I, a unit in the 
generation they have enslaved, clanked my fetters and 
trailed my golden chain. I had begun a set of stories in 
many various metres, to be called " Roses of Midnight." 
One of the characteristics of the volume was that daylight 
was banished from its pages. In the sensual lamplight 
of yellow boudoirs, or the wild moonlight of centenarian 
forests, my fantastic loves lived out their lives, died with 
the dawn which was supposed to be an awakening to 
consciousness of reality. 



CHAPTER V. 

A LAST hour of vivid blue and gold glare ; but now 
the twilight sheds softly upon the darting rays, and 
only the little oval frames catch the fleeting beams. I 
go to the miniatures. Amid the parliamentary faces, all 
strictly garrotted with many-folded handerchiefs, there 
is a metal frame enchased with rubies and a few emer- 
alds. And this chef cCceuvre of antique workmanship 
surrounds a sharp, shrewdish, modern face, withal pretty. 
Fair she is and thin. 

She is a woman of thirty, — no, — she is the woman of 
thirty. Balzac has written some admirable pages on 
this subject ; my memory of them is vague and uncer- 
tain, although durable, as all memories of him must be. 
But that marvellous story, or rather study, has been 
blunted in my knowledge of this tiny face with the fine 
masses of hair drawn up from the neck and arranged 
elaborately on the crown. There is no fear of plagiary ; 
he cannot have said all ; he cannot have said what I 
want to say. 

Looking at this face so mundane, so intellectually 
mundane, I see why a young man of refined mind — a 
bachelor who spends at least a pound a day on his 
pleasures, and in whose library are found some few vol- 
umes of modern poetry — seeks his ideal in a woman of 
thirty. 

It is clear that, by the very essence of her being, the 
young girl may evoke no ideal but that of home ; and 

56 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 57 

home is in his eyes the antithesis of freedom, desire, as- 
piration. He longs for mystery, deep and endless, and 
he is tempted with a foolish little illusion — white dresses, 
water-color drawings, and popular music. He dreams 
of Pleasure, and he is offered Duty ; for do not think 
that that sylph-like waist does not suggest to him a yard 
of apron-string, cries of children, and that most odious 
word, " Papa." A young man of refined mind can look 
through the glass of the years. 

He has sat in the stalls, opera-glass in hand ; he has 
met women of thirty at balls, and has sat with them be- 
neath shadowy curtains ; he knows that the world is full 
of beautiful women, all waiting to be loved and amused ; 
the circles of his immediate years are filled with feminine 
faces, they cluster like flowers on this side and that, and 
they fade into garden-like spaces of color. How many 
may love him ? The loveliest may one day smile upon 
his knee ! and shall he renounce all for that little crea- 
ture who has just finished singing, and is handing round 
cups of tea ? Every bachelor contemplating marriage 
says, " I shall have to give up all for one, one." 

The young girl is often pretty, but her prettiness is 
vague and uncertain, — it inspires a sort of pitying admi- 
ration, but it suggests nothing ; the very essence of the 
young girl's being is that she should have nothing to 
suggest, therefore the beauty of the young face fails to 
touch the imagination. No past lies hidQen in those 
translucid eyes, no story of hate, disappointment, or sin. 
Nor is there in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases in a 
thousand any doubt that the hand, that spends at least a 
pound a day in restaurants and cabs, will succeed in 
gathering the muslin flower if he so wills it, and by doing 
so he will delight every one. Where, then, is the strug- 



58 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

gle ? where, then, is the triumph ? Therefore, I say that 
if a young man's heart is not set on children, and tiresome 
dinner-parties, the young girl presents to him no possible 
ideal. But the woman of thirty presents from the out- 
set all that is necessary to ensnare the heart of a young 
man. I see her sitting in her beautiful drawing-room, 
all composed by, and all belonging to her. Her chair is 
placed beneath an evergreen plant, and the long leaves 
lean out as if to touch her neck. The great white and 
red rose of the d'aubusson carpet are spread enigmati- 
cally about her feline feet ; a grand piano leans its me- 
lodious mouth to her ; and there she sits when her 
visitors have left her, playing Beethoven's sonatas in the 
dreamy firelight. The spring-tide shows but a bloom of 
unvarying freshness ; August has languished and loved 
in the strength of the sun. She is stately, she is tall. 
What sins, what disappointments, what aspirations lie in 
those gray eyes, mysteriously still,. and mysteriously re- 
vealed. These a young man longs to know of, they are 
his life. He imagines himself sitting by her, when the 
others have gone, holding her hand, calling on her name ; 
sometimes she moves away and plays the Moonlight 
Sonata. Letting her hands drop upon the keys she talks 
sadly, maybe affectionately ; she speaks of the tedium 
of life, its disenchantments. He knows well what she 
means, he has suffered as she has ; but could he tell her, 
could she understand, that in his love reality would dis- 
solve into a dream, all limitations would open in bound- 
less infinity. 

The husband he rarely sees. Sometimes a latch-key 
is heard about half-past six. The man is thick, strong, 
common ; his jaws are heavy ; his eyes are expression- 
less ; there is about him the loud swagger of the caserne j 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 59 

and he suggests the inevitable question, Why did she 
marry him ? — a question that every young man of 
refined mind asks a thousand times by day and ten 
thousand times by night, asks till he is five-and-thirty, 
and sees that his generation has passed into middle age. 

Why did she marry him ? Not the sea, nor the sky, 
nor the great mysterious midnight, when he opens his 
casement and gazes into starry space, will give him 
answer ; riddle that no GEdipus will ever come to 
unravel ; this sphinx will never throw herself from the 
rock into the clangor of the sea-gulls and waves ; she 
will never divulge her secret ; and if she is the woman 
and not a woman of thirty, she has forgotten. 

The young man shakes hands with the husband ; he 
strives not to look embarrassed, and he talks of indiffer- 
ent things — of how well he (the husband) is looking, of 
his amusements, his projects ; and then he (the young 
man of refined mind) tastes of that keen and highly 
seasoned delight — happiness in crime. He knows not 
the details of her home life, the husband is merely a 
dark cloud that fills one side of the picture, sometimes 
obliterating the sunlight ; a shadowy shape that in cer- 
tain moments solidifies and assumes the likeness of a 
rock-sculptured, imminent monster ; but the shadow 
and the shape and the threat are magnetic, and in a 
sense of danger the fascination is sealed. . . . 

See the young man of refined mind in a ball room ! 
He is leaning against the woodwork in a distant door- 
way, he scarcely knows what to do with himself ; and 
he is now striving to interest himself in the conversation 
of a group of men twice his age. I will not say he is 
shunned ; but neither the matrons nor the young girls 
make any advances towards him. The young girls 



60 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

looking so sweet — in the oneness of their fresh hair, 
flowers, dresses, and glances — are being introduced, are 
getting up to dance, and the hostess is looking round 
for partners. She sees the young man in the doorway ; 
but she hesitates and goes to some one else ; and if you 
asked her why, she could not tell you why she avoided 
him. Presently the woman of thirty enters. She is in 
white satin and diamonds. She looks for him — a circu- 
lar glance — and calm with possession she passes to a 
seat. She dances the eighth, twelfth, and fifteenth waltz 
with him. 

Will he induce her to visit his rooms ? Will they be 
like mine — strange debauches of color and Turkish 
lamps, Marshall's taste, an old cabinet, a faded pastel 
which embalms the memory of a pastoral century, my 
taste ; or will it be a library — two leather library chairs, 
a large escritoire, etc. ? Be this as it may, whether the 
apartments be the ruthless extravagance of artistic 
impulse, or the subdued taste of the student, she, the 
woman of thirty, shall be there by night and day : her 
statue is there, and even when she is sleeping safe in 
her husband's arms, with fevered brow he, the young 
man of refined mind, alone and lonely shall kneel and 
adore her. 

And should she not visit his rooms ? If the complex 
and various accidents of existence should have ruled out 
her life virtuously ; if the many inflections of sentiment 
have decided against this last consummation, then she 
will wax to the complete, the unfathomable temptress — 
the Lilith of old — she will never set him free, and in the 
end will be found about his heart " one single golden 
hair." She shall haunt his wife's face and words 
(should he seek to rid himself of her by marriage), a 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 6l 

bitter sweet, a half-welcome enchantment ; she shall 
consume and destroy the strength and spirit of his life, 
leaving it desolation, a barren landscape, burnt and 
faintly scented with the sea. Fame and wealth shall slip 
like sand from him. She may be set aside for the 
cadence of a rhyme, for the flowing line of a limb, but 
when the passion of art has raged itself out, she shall 
return to blight the peace of the worker. 

A terrible malady is she, a malady the ancients knew 
of and called nympholepsy — a beautiful name evocative 
and symbolic of its ideal aspect, " the breast of the 
nymph in the brake." And the disease is not extinct in 
these modern days, nor will it ever be so long as men 
shall yearn for the unattainable ; and the prosy bachelors 
who trail their ill-fated lives from their chambers to their 
clubs know of, and they call their malady— the woman 
of thirty. 



CHAPTER VI. 

A JAPANESE dressing-gown, the ideality of whose 
tissue delights me, some fresh honey and milk set 
by this couch hung with royal fringes ; and having 
partaken of this odorous refreshment, I call to Jack my 
great python, that is crawling about after a two months' 
fast. I tie up a guinea-pig to the tabouret, pure Louis 
XV ; the little beast struggles and squeaks, — the snake, 
his black, bead-like eyes are fixed, how superb are the 
oscillations ! — now he strikes, and slowly and with what 
exquisite gourmandise he lubricates and swallows. 

Marshall is at the organ in the hall ; he is playing a 
Gregorian chant, that beautiful hymn, the " Vexilla 
Regis," by Saint Fortunatus, the great poet of the 
Middle Ages. And, having turned over the leaves of 
" Les Fetes Galantes," I sit down to write. 

My original intention was to write some thirty or forty 
stories varying from thirty to three hundred lines in 
length. The nature of these stories is easy to imagine : 
there was the youth who wandered by night into the 
witches' sabbath, and was disputed for by the witches, 
young and old. There was the light o' love who went 
into the desert to tempt the holy man ; but he died as he 
yielded, and the arms stiffening by some miracle to iron- 
like rigidity, she was unable to free herself, and died of 
starvation, as her bondage loosened in decay. And I 
had increased my difficulties by adopting as part of my 
task the introduction of all sorts of elaborate, and in 

62 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 63 

many cases extravagantly composed, metres, and I had 
begun to feel that I was working in sand, I could make 
no progress, the house I was raising crumbled and fefl 
away on every side. These stories had one merit : they 
were all, so far as I can remember, perfectly constructed. 
Far the art of telling a story clearly and dramatically, 
selon les procedes de M. Scribe, I had thoroughly learned 
from old M. Duval, the author of a hundred and sixty 
plays, written in collaboration with more than a hundred 
of the best writers of his day, including the master him- 
self, Gautier. I frequently met M. Duval at breakfast 
at a neighboring cafe, and our conversation turned on 
I" exposition de la piece, preparer la situation, nous aurons 
des larmes, etc. One day, as I sat waiting for him, I 
took up the Voltaire. It contained an article by M. 
Zola. Naturalisme, la ve'rite', la science, were repeated 
some half-a-dozen times. Hardly able to believe my 
eyes, I read that you should write with as little imagina- 
tion as possible, that plot in a novel or in a play was 
illiterate and puerile, and that the art of M. Scribe was 
an art of strings and wires, etc. I rose up from break- 
fast, ordered my coffee, and stirred the sugar, a little 
dizzy, like one who has received a violent blow on the 
head. 

Echo-augury ! Words heard in an unexpected quar- 
ter, but applying marvellously well to the besetting 
difficulty of the moment. The reader who has followed 
me so far will remember the instant effect the word 
" Shelley " had upon me in childhood, and how it called 
into existence a train of feeling that illuminated the 
vicissitudes and passions of many years, until it was 
finally assimilated and became part of my being ; the 
reader will also remember how the mere mention, at a 



64 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

certain moment, of the word " France " awoke a vitai 
impulse, even a sense of final ordination, and how the 
irrevocable message was obeyed, and how it led to the 
creation of a mental existence. 

And now for a third time I experienced the pain and 
joy of a sudden and inward light. Naturalism, truth, 
the new art, above all the phrase, " the new art," im- 
pressed me as with a sudden sense of light. I was 
dazzled, and I vaguely understood that my " Roses of 
Midnight " were sterile eccentricities, dead flowers that 
could not be galvanized into any semblance of life, pas- 
sionless in all their passion. 

I had read a few chapters of the " Assommoir," as it 
appeared in La Republique des Lettres; I had cried, 
" ridiculous, abominable," only because it is character- 
istic of me to instantly form an opinion and assume at 
once a violent attitude. But now I bought up the back 
numbers of the Voltaire, and I looked forward to the 
weekly exposition of the new faith with febrile eager- 
ness. The great zeal with which the new master con- 
tinued his propaganda, and the marvellous way in which 
subjects the most diverse, passing events, political, 
social, religious, were caught up and turned into argu- 
ments for or proof of the truth of naturalism astonished 
me wholly. The idea of a new art based upon science, 
in opposition to the art of the old world that was based 
on imagination, an art that should explain all things and 
embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless rami- 
fications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civiliza- 
tion, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before 
the vastness of the conception, and the towering height 
of the ambition. In my fevered fancy I saw a new race 
of writers that would arise, and with the aid of the novel 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 65 

would continue to a more glorious and legitimate con- 
clusion the work that the prophets had begun ; and at 
each development of the theory of the new art and 
its universal applicability, my wonder increased and my 
admiration choked me. If any one should be tempted 
to turn to the books themselves to seek an explanation 
of this wild ecstacy, they would find nothing — as well 
drink the dregs of yesterday's champagne. One is lying 
before me now, and as I glance through the pages list- 
lessly I say, " Only the simple, crude statements of a 
man of powerful mind, but singularly narrow vision." 

Still, although eager and anxious for the fray, I did 
not see how I was to participate in it. I was not a nov- 
elist, nor yet a dramatic author, and the possibility of a 
naturalistic poet seemed to me a little doubtful. I had 
clearly understood that the lyrical quality was to be 
forever banished ; there were no harps and lutes in our 
heaven, only drums ; and the preservation of all the es- 
sentials of poetry, by the simple enumeration of the 
utensils to be found in a back kitchen, did, I could not 
help thinking (here it becomes necessary to whisper), 
sound not unlike rigmarole. I waited for the master to 
speak. He had declared that the republic would fall if 
it did not become instantly naturalistic ; he would not, 
he could not pass over in silence so important a branch 
of literature as poetry, no matter how contemptible he 
might think it. If he could find nothing to praise, he 
must at least condemn. At last the expected article came. 
It was all that could be desired by one in my fever 
of mind. Hugo's claims had been previously disproven, 
but now Banville and Gautier were declared to be 
warmed-up dishes of the ancient world ; Baudelaire was 
a naturalist, but he had been spoiled by the romantic 



66 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

influence of his generation. Cependant there were indi- 
cations of the naturalistic movement even in poetry. I 
trembled with excitement, I could not read fast enough. 
Coppee had striven to simplify language ; he had versi- 
sified the street cries, Achetezla France, le Soir, le Rappel ; 
he had sought to give utterance to humble sentiments 
as in " Le Petit Epicier de Montrouge," the little grocer 
qui cassait le sucre avec itiilancolie ; Richepin had boldly 
and frankly adopted the language of the people in all its 
superb crudity. All this was, however, preparatory and 
tentative. We are waiting for our poet, he who will 
sing to us fearlessly of the rude industry of dustmen 
and the comestible glories of the market-places. The 
subjects are to hand, the formula alone is wanting. 

The prospect was a dazzling one ; I tried to calm my- 
self. Had I the stuff in me to win and to wear these 
bays, this stupendous laurel crown ? — bays, laurel crown, 
a distinct souvenir of Parnassus, but there is no modern 
equivalent, I must strive to invent a new one, — in the 
mean time let me think. True it is that Swinburne was 
before me with the " Romantiques." The hymn to 
Proserpine and Dolores are wonderful lyrical versions 
of Mile, de Maupin. In form the Leper is old Eng- 
lish, the coloring is Baudelaire, but the rude industry of 
the dustmen and the comestible glories of the market- 
place shall be mine. A bas " Les Roses de Minuit ! " 

I felt the " naturalization " of " Roses of Midnight " 
would prove a difficult task. I soon found it an impos- 
sible one, and I laid the poems aside and commenced a 
volume redolent of the delights of Bougival and Ville 
d'Avray. This book was to be entitled " Poems of 
' Flesh and Blood."' 

" Elle mit son plus beau chapeau. son chapeau bleu" . . . 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 67 

and then ? Why, then picking up her skirt she threads her 
way through the crowded streets, reads the advertisements 
on the walls, hails the omnibus, inquires at the concierge's 
loge, murmurs as she goes upstairs, " Que c'est haul le 
cinqieme" and then ? Why, the door opens, and she 
cries, " Je faime." 

But it was the idea of the new aestheticism — the new 
art corresponding to modern, as ancient art corresponded 
to ancient life — that captivated me, that led me away, 
and not a substantial knowledge of the work done by 
the naturalists. I had read the " Assommoir," and had 
been much impressed by its pyramid size, strength, 
height, and decorative grandeur, and also by the im- 
mense harmonic development of the idea ; and thefugal 
treatment of the different scenes had seemed to me as- 
tonishingly new — the washhouse, for example ; the fight 
motive is indicated, then follows the development of side 
issues, then comes the fight motive explained ; it is 
broken off short, it flutters through a web of progressive 
detail, the fight motive is again taken up, and now it is 
worked out in all its fulness ; it is worked up to cresce?i- 
do, another side issue is introduced, and again the theme 
is given forth. And I marvelled greatly at the lordly, 
river-like roll of the narrative, sometimes widening out 
into lakes and shallowing meres, but never stagnating 
in fen or marshlands. The language, too, which I did 
not then recognize as the weak point, being little more 
than a boiling-down of Chateaubriand and Flaubert, 
spiced with Goncourt, delighted me with its novelty, its 
richness, its force. Nor did I then even roughly sus- 
pect that the very qualities which set my admiration in 
a blaze wilder than wildfire, being precisely those that 
had won the victory for the romantic school forty years 



68 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

before, were very antagonistic to those claimed for the 
new art ; I was deceived, as was all my generation, by a 
certain externality, an outer skin, a nearness, un approve- 
ment j in a word, by a substitution of Paris for the dis- 
tant and exotic backgrounds so beloved of the romantic 
school. I did not know then, as I do now, that art is 
eternal, that it is only the artist that changes, and that 
the two great divisions — the only possible divisions — 
are : those who have talent, and those who have no tal- 
ent. But I do not regret my errors, my follies ; it is 
not well to know at once of the limitations of life and 
things. I should be less than nothing had it not been 
for my enthusiasms ; they were the saving clause in my 
life. 

But although I am apt to love too dearly the art of 
my day, and at the cost of that of other days, I did not 
fall into the fatal mistake of placing the realistic writers 
of 1877 side by side with and on the same plane of in- 
tellectual vision as the great Balzac ; I felt that the vast 
immemorial mind rose above them all, like a mountain 
above the highest tower. 

And, strange to say, it was Gautier that introduced 
me to Balzac ; for mention is made in the wonderful 
preface to " Les Fleurs du Mai " of Seraphita : Sera- 
phita, Seraphitus ; which is it ? — woman or man ? Should 
Wilfred or Mona be the possessor ? A new Mile, de 
Maupin, with royal lily and aureole, cloud-capped moun- 
tains, great gulfs of sea-water flowing up and reflecting 
as in a mirror the steep cliff's side ; the straight white 
feet are set thereon, the obscuring weft of flesh is torn, 
and the pure, strange soul continues its mystical exhor- 
tations. Then the radiant vision, a white glory, the 
last outburst and manifestation, the trumpets of the 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 69 

apocalypse, the color of heaven ; the closing of the stu- 
pendous allegory when Seraphita lies dead in the rays 
of the first sun of the nineteenth century. 

I, therefore, had begun, as it were, to read Balzac 
backwards ; instead of beginning with the plain, simple) 
earthly tragedy of the Pere Goriot, I first knelt in a 
beautiful but distant coigne of the great world of his 
genius — Seraphita. Certain nicances of soul are charac- 
teristic of certain latitudes, and what subtle instinct led 
him to Norway in quest of this fervent soul ? The in- 
stinct of genius are unfathomable ; but he who has 
known the white northern women with their pure spirit- 
ual eyes, will aver that instinct led him aright. I have 
known one, one whom I used to call Seraphita ; Coppee 
knew her too, and that exquisite volume, " L'Exile," so 
Seraphita-like in the keen blond passion of its verse, 
was written to her, and each poem was sent to her as it 
was written. Where is she now, that flower of northern 
snow, once seen for a season in Paris ? Has she re- 
turned to her native northern solitudes, great gulfs of 
sea-water, mountain rocks, and pine ? 

Balzac's genius is in his titles as heaven is in its stars : 
" Melmoth Reconcilie," " Jesus-Christ en Flandres," " Le 
Revers d'un Grand Homme," " La Cousine Bette." I 
read somewhere not very long ago, that Balzac was the 
greatest thinker that had appeared in France since Pas- 
cal. Of Pascal's claim to be a great thinker I confess I 
cannot judge. No man is greater than the age he lives 
in, and, therefore, to talk to us, the legitimate children 
of the nineteenth century, of logical proofs of the exist- 
ence of God strikes us in just the same light as the 
logical proof of the existence of Jupiter Ammon. " Les 
Pensees " could appear to me only as infinitely childish ; 



70 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

the form is no doubt superb, but tiresome and sterile to 
one of such modern and exotic taste as myself. Still I 
accept thankfully, in its sense of two hundred years, the 
compliment paid to Balzac ; but I would add that per- 
sonally he seems to me to have shown greater wings of 
mind than any artist that ever lived. I am aware that 
this last statement will make many cry " fool " and hiss 
" Shakespeare ! " But I am not putting forward these 
criticisms axiomatically, but only as the expressions of an 
individual taste, and interesting so far as they reveal to 
the reader the different developments and the progress 
of my mind. It might prove a little tiresome, but it 
would no doubt " look well," in the sense that going to 
church " looks well," if I were to write in here ten pages 
of praise of our national bard. I must, however, resist 
the temptation to " look well "; a confession is interest- 
ing in proportion to the amount of truth it contains, and 
I will, therefore, state frankly I never derived any profit 
whatever, and very little pleasure, from the reading of 
the great plays. The beauty of the verse ! Yes ; he 
who loved Shelley so well as I could not fail to hear the 
melody of — 

" Music to hear, why hearest thou music sadly ? 
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy." 

Is not such music as this enough ? Of course, but I 
am a sensualist in literature. I may see perfectly well 
that this or that book is a work of genius, but if it 
doesn't " fetch me," it doesn't concern me, and I forget 
its very existence. What leaves me cold to-day will 
madden me to-morrow. With me literature is a question 
of sense, intellectual sense if you will, but sense all the 
same, and ruled by the same caprices — those of the flesh ? 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 7 1 

Now we enter on very subtle distinctions. No doubt 
that there is the brain-judgment and the sense-judgment 
of a work of art. And it will be noticed that these two 
forces of discrimination exist sometimes almost inde- 
pendently of each other, in rare and radiant instances 
confounded and blended in one immense and unique 
love. Who has not been, unless perhaps some dusty 
old pedant, thrilled and driven to pleasure by the action 
of a book that penetrates to and speaks to you of your 
most present and most intimate emotions. This is of 
course pure sensualism ; but to take a less marked 
stage, — why should Marlowe enchant me ? why should 
he delight and awake enthusiasm in me, while Shake- 
speare leaves me cold ? The mind that can understand 
one can understand the other, but there are affinities in 
literature corresponding to, and very analogous to, sex- 
ual affinities — the same unreasoned attractions, the same 
pleasures, the same lassitudes. Those we have loved 
most we are most indifferent to. Shelley, Gautier, Zola, 
Flaubert, Goncourt ! how I have loved you all ; and now 
I could not, would not, read you again. How womanly, 
how capricious ; but even a capricious woman is con- 
stant, if not faithful, to her amant de coeur. And so with 
me ; of those I have loved deeply there is but one that 
still may thrill me with the old passion, with the first 
ecstacy — it is Balzac. Upon that rock I built my church, 
and his great and valid talent saved me often from des- 
truction, saved me from the shoaling waters of new 
aestheticisms, the putrid mud of naturalism, and the faint 
and sickly surf of the symbolists. Thinking of him, I 
could not forget that it is the spirit and not the flesh 
that is eternal ; that, as it was thought that in the first 
Instance gave man speech, so to the end it shall still be 



72 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

thought that shall make speech beautiful and remember- 
able. The grandeur and sublimity of Balzac's thoughts 
seem to me to rise to the loftiest heights, and his range 
is limitless ; there is no passion he has not touched, 
and what is more marvellous, he has given to each 
in art a place equivalent to the place it occupies in 
nature ; his intense and penetrating sympathy for 
human life and all that concerns it enabled him to 
surround the humblest subjects with awe and crown 
them with the light of tragedy. There are some, 
particularly those who are capable of understanding 
neither and can read but one, who will object to 
any comparison being drawn between the Dramatist 
and the Novelist ; but I confess that I — if the in- 
herent superiority of verse over prose, which I 
admit unhesitatingly, be waived — that I fail, utterly fail 
to see in what Shakespeare is greater than Balzac. The 
range of the poet's thought is of necessity not so wide, 
and his concessions must needs be greater than the 
novelist's. On these points we will cry quits, and come 
at once to the vital question — the creation. Is Lucien 
inferior to Hamlet ? Is Eugenie Grandet inferior to 
Desdemona ? Is her father inferior to Shylock ? Is 
Macbeth inferior to Vautrin ? Can it be said that the 
apothecary in the " Cousine Bette," or the Baron Hulot, 
or the Cousine Bette herself is inferior to anything the 
brain of man has ever conceived ? And it must not be 
forgotten that Shakespeare has had three hundred years 
and the advantage of stage representation to impress his 
characters on the sluggish mind of the world ; and as 
mental impressions are governed by the same laws of 
gravitation as atoms, our realization of Falstaff must of 
necessity be more vivid than any character in contem- 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 73 

porary literature, although it were equally great. And 
so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and hear 
I speak with absolute sincerity and conviction, the work 
of the novelist seems to me richer than that of the 
dramatist. Who shall forget those terrible words of the 
poor life-weary orphan in the boarding-house ? Speak- 
ing of Vautrin she says, " His look frightens me as if he 
put his hand on my dress "; and another epigram from 
the same book, " Woman's virtue is man's greatest inven- 
tion." Find me anything in La Rochefoucauld that goes 
more incisively to the truth of things. One more ; here 
I can give the exact words : " La gloire est le soleil des 
morts." It would be easy to compile a book of sayings 
from Balzac that would make all " Maximes " and 
Pensees," even those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert, 
seem trivial and shallow. 

Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and 
my reading culminated in the " Comedie Humain." I 
no doubt fluttered through some scores of other books, 
of prose and verse, sipping a little honey, but he alone 
left any important or lasting impression upon my mind. 
The rest was like walnuts and wine, an agreeable after- 
taste. 

But notwithstanding all this reading I can lay no 
claim to scholarship of any kind ; for save life I could 
never learn anything correctly. I am a student only of 
ball-rooms, bar-rooms, streets, and alcoves. I have read 
very little ; but all I read I can turn to account, and all 
I read I remember. To read freely, extensively, has 
always been my ambition, and my utter inability to study 
has always been to me a subject of grave inquietude, — 
study as constrasted with a general and haphazard 
gathering of ideas taken in flight. But in me the 



74 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

impulse is so original to frequent the haunts of men that 
it is irresistible ; conversation is the breath of my nostrils, 
I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring from 
it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with 
the world is in me the generating force ; without it what 
invention I have is thin and sterile, and it grows 
thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it did in 
the composition of my unfortunate " Roses of Mid- 
night." 

Men and women, oh the strength of the living faces ! 
conversation, oh the magic of it ! It is a fabulous river 
of gold where the precious metal is washed up without 
stint for all to take, to take as much as he can carry. 
Two old ladies discussing the peerage ? Much may be 
learned, it is gold ; poets and wits, then it is fountains 
whose spray solidifies into jewels, and every herb and 
plant is begemmed with the sparkle of the diamond and 
the glow of the ruby. 

I did not go to either Oxford or Cambridge, but I 
went to the " Nouvelle Athenes." What is the " Nou- 
velle Athenes" ? He who would know anything of my 
life must know something of the academy of the fine arts. 
Not the official stupidity you read of in the daily papers, 
but the real French academy, the cafe. The " Nouvelle 
Athenes " is a cafe on the Place Pigale. Ah ! the morn- 
ing idlenesses and the long evenings when life was but 
a summer illusion, the gray moonlights on the Place 
where we used to stand on the pavements, the shutters 
clanging up behind us, loth to separate, thinking of 
what we had left said, and how much better we might 
have enforced our arguments. Dead and scattered are 
all those who used to assemble there, and those years 
and our home, for it was our home, live only in a few 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 75 

pictures and a few pages of prose. The same old story, 
the vanquished only are victorious ; and though unac- 
knowledged, though unknown, the influence of the 
" Nouvelle Athenes " is inveterate in the artistic thought 
of the nineteenth century. 

How magnetic, intense, and vivid are these memories 
of youth. With what strange, almost unnatural clear- 
ness do I see and hear, — see the white face of that caf6, 
the white nose of that block of houses, stretching up to 
the Place, between two streets. I can see down the in- 
cline of those two streets, and I know what shops are 
there ; I can hear the glass-door of the cafe grate on the 
sand as I open it. I can recall the smell of every hour. 
In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter, the pun- 
gent cigarette, coffee and bad cognac ; at five o'clock the 
fragrant odor of absinthe ; and soon after the steaming 
soup ascends from the kitchen ; and as the evening 
advances, the mingled smells of cigarettes, coffee, and 
weak beer. A partition, rising a few feet or more over 
the hats, separates the glass front from the main body 
of the cafe. The usual marble tables are there, and it is 
there we sat and aestheticized till two o'clock in the morn- 
ing. But who is that man ? he whose prominent eyes 
flash with excitement. That is Villiers de l'lsle-Adam. 
The last or the supposed last of the great family. 
He is telling that girl a story — that fair girl with heavy 
eyelids, stupid and sensual. She is, however, genuinely 
astonished and interested, and he is striving to play upon 
her ignorance. Listen to him. " Spain — the night is 
fragrant with the sea and the perfume of the orange- 
trees, you know — a midnight of stars and dreams. Now 
and then the silence is broken by the sentries challeng- 
ing — that is all. But not in Spanish but in French are 



76 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

the challenges given ; the town is in the hands of the 
French ; it is under martial law. But now an officer 
passes down a certain garden, a Spaniard disguised as a 
French officer ; from the balcony the family — one of the 
most noble and oldest families Spain can boast of, a 
thousand years, long before the conquest of the Moors 
— watches him. Well then " — Villiers sweeps with a 
white feminine hand the long hair that is falling over 
his face — he has half forgotten, he is a little mixed in 
the opening of the story, and he is striving in English to 
" scamp," in French to escamoter. " The family are 
watching, death if he is caught, if he falls to kill the 
French sentry. The cry of a bird, some vague sound 
attracts the sentry, he turns ; all is lost. The Spaniard 
is seized. Martial law, Spanish conspiracy must be put 
down. The French general is a man of iron." (Villiers 
laughs, a short hesitating laugh that is characteristic of 
him, and continues in his abrupt, uncertain way), " man 
of iron ; not only he declares that the spy must be be- 
headed, but also the entire family — a man of iron that, 
ha, ha ; and then, no you cannot, it is impossible for you 
to understand the enormity of the calamity — a thousand 
years before the conquest by the Moors, a Spaniard 
alone could — there is no one here, ha, ha, I was forget- 
ting — the utter extinction of a great family of the name, 
the oldest and noblest of all the families in Spain, it is 
not easy to understand that, no, not easy here in the 
1 Nouvelle Athenes ' — ha, ha, one must belong to a great 
family to understand, ha, ha. 

" The father beseeches, he begs that one member may 
be spared to continue the name — the youngest son — 
that is all ; if he could be saved, the rest what matter ? 
death is nothing to a Spaniard ; the family, the name, a 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 77 

thousand years of name is everything. The general is, 
you know, a ' man of iron.' ' Yes, one member of your 
family shall be respited, but on one condition.' To the 
agonized family conditions are as nothing. But they 
don't know the man of iron is determined to make a 
terrible example, and they cry, 'Any conditions.' 'He 
who is respited must serve as executioner to the others.' 
Great is the doom ; you understand ; but after all the 
name must be saved. Then in the family council the 
father goes to his youngest son and says, ' I have been 
a good father to you, my son ; I have always been a 
kind father, have I not ? answer me ; I have never 
refused you anything. Now you will not fail us, you 
will prove yourself worthy of the great name you bear. 
Remember your great ancestor who defeated the Moors, 
remember.' " (Villiers strives to get in a little local 
color, but his knowledge of Spanish names and history 
is limited, and he in a certain sense fails.) " Then the 
mother comes to her son and says, ' My son, I have been 
a good mother, I have always loved you ; say you will 
not desert us in this hour of our great need.' Then the 
little sister comes, and the whole family kneels down 
and appeals to the horror-stricken boy. . . . 

" ' He will not prove himself unworthy of our name,' 
cries the father. ' Now, my son, courage, take the axe 
firmly, do what I ask you, courage, strike straight.' 
The father's head falls into the sawdust, the blood all 
over the white beard ; then comes the elder brother, and 
then another brother ; and then, oh, the little sister was 
almost more than he could bear, and the mother had to 
whisper, ' Remember your promise to your father, to 
your dead father.' The mother laid her head on the 
blook, but he could not strike. ' Be not the first coward 



78 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

of our name, strike ; remember your promise to us all,' 
and her head was struck off." 

" And the son," the girl asks, " what became of 
him ? " 

" He never was seen, save at night, walking, a solitary 
man, beneath the walls of his castle in Granada." 

" And whom did he marry ? " 

" He never married." 

Then after a long silence some one said, — 

" Whose story is that ? " 

" Balzac's." 

At that moment the glass door of the cafe grated upon 
the sanded floor, and Manet entered. Although by birth 
and by art essentially Parisian, there was something in his 
appearance and manner of speaking that often suggested 
an Englishman. Perhaps it was his dress — his clean-cut 
clothes and figure. That figure ! those square shoulders 
that swaggered as he went across a room and the thin 
waist ; and that face, the beard and nose, satyr-like shall 
I say ? No, for I would evoke an idea of beauty of line 
united to that of intellectual expression — frank words, 
frank passion in his convictions, loyal and simple phrases, 
clear as well-water, sometimes a little hard, sometimes, 
as they flowed away, bitter, but at the fountain-head 
sweet and full of light. He sits next to Degas, that 
round-shouldered man in suit of pepper-and-salt. There 
is nothing very trenchantly French about him either, 
except the large necktie ; his eyes are small and his words 
are sharp, ironical, cynical. These two men are the leaders 
of the impressionist school. Their friendship has been 
jarred by inevitable rivalry. " Degas was painting ' Semi- 
ramis ' when I was painting ' Modern Paris,' " says Manet. 
" Manet is in despair because he cannot paint atrocious 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 79 

pictures like Durant, and be feted and decorated ; he is 
an artist, not by inclination, but by force. He is as a 
galley slave chained to the oar," says Degas. Different 
too are their methods of work. Manet paints his whole 
picture from nature, trusting his instinct to lead him 
aright through the devious labyrinth of selection. Nor 
does his instinct ever fail him, there is a vision in his 
eyes which he calls nature, and which he paints uncon- 
sciously as he digests his food, thinking and declaring 
vehemently that the artist should not seek a synthesis, 
but should paint merely what he sees. This extraordin- 
ary oneness of nature and artistic vision does not exist 
in Degas, and even his portraits are composed from 
drawings and notes. About midnight Catulle Mendes 
will drop in, when he has corrected his proofs. He will 
come with his fine paradoxes and his strained eloquence. 
He will lean towards you, he will take you by the arm, 
and his presence is a nervous pleasure. And when the 
cafe is closed, when the last bock has been drunk, we 
shall walk about the great moonlight of the Place Pigale, 
and through the dark shadows of the streets, talking of 
the last book published, he hanging on my arm, speak- 
ing in that high febrile voice of his, every phrase lumin- 
ous, aerial, even as the soaring moon and the fitful clouds. 
Duranty, an unknown Stendal, will come in for an hour 
or so ; he will talk little and go away quietly; he knows, 
and his whole manner shows that he knows that he is a 
defeated man ; and if you ask him why he does not 
write another novel, he will say, " What's the good, it 
would not be read ; no one read the others, and I 
mightn't do even as well if I tried again." Paul Alexis, 
Leon Diex, Pissarro, Cabaner, are also frequently seen 
in the " Nouvelle Athenes." 



80 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

Cabaner ! the world knows not the names of those 
who scorn the world : somewhere in one of the great 
populous churchyards of Paris there is a forgotten grave, 
and there lies Cabaner. Cabaner ! since the beginning 
there have been, till the end of time there shall be Cab- 
aners ; and they shall live miserably and they shall die 
miserable, and shall be forgotten ; and there shall never 
arise a novelist great enough to make live in art that 
eternal spirit of devotion, disinterestedness, and aspira- 
tion, which in each generation incarnates itself in one 
heroic soul. Better than those who stepped to opulence 
and fame upon thee fallen thou wert ; better, loftier- 
minded, purer ; thy destiny was to fall that others might 
rise upon thee ; thou wert one of the noble legion of the 
conquered ; let praise be given to the conquered, for the 
brunt of victory lies with the conquered. Child of the 
pavement, of strange sonnets and stranger music, I re- 
member thee ; I remember the silk shirts, the four sous 
of Italian cheese, the roll of bread, and the glass of milk; 
— the streets were thy dining-room. And the five-mile 
walk daily to the suburban music hall where five francs 
were earned by playing the accompaniments of comic 
songs. And the wonderful room on the fifth floor, which 
was furnished when that celebrated heritage of two thou- 
sand francs was paid. I remember the fountain that was 
bought for a wardrobe, and the American organ with all 
the instruments of the orchestra, and the plaster casts 
under which the homeless ones that were never denied 
a refuge and a crust by thee slept. I remember all, and 
the buying of the life-size " Venus de Milo." Some- 
thing extraordinary would be done with it, I knew, but 
the result exceeded my wildest expectation. The head 
must needs be struck off, so that the rapture of thy ad- 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 8l 

miration should be secure from all jarring reminiscence 
of the streets. 

Then the wonderful story of the tenor, the pork 
butcher, who was heard giving out such a volume of 
sound that the sausages were set in motion above him ; 
he was fed, clothed, and educated on the five francs a 
day earned in the music hall in the Avenue de la Motte 
Piquet ; and when he made his ddbut at the Theatre 
Lyrique, thou wert in the last stage of consumption and 
too ill to go to hear thy pupil's success. He was im- 
mediately engaged by Mapleson and taken to America. 

I remember thy face, Cabaner ; I can see it now — 
that long sallow face ending in a brown beard, and the 
hollow eyes, the meagre arms covered with a silk shirt, 
contrasting strangely with the rest of the dress. In all 
thy privation and poverty, thou didst never forego thy 
silk shirt. I remember the paradoxes and the aphorisms, 
if not the exact words, the glamour and the sentiment 
of a humor that was all thy own. Never didst thou 
laugh ; no, not even when in discussing how silence 
might be rendered in music, thou didst say, with thy 
extraordinary Pyrenean accent, " Pour rendre le silence en 
music il 77ie faudrait trois orchestres niilitaires." And 
when I did show thee some poor verses of mine, French 
verses, for at this time I hated and had partly forgotten 
my native language— 

" My dear Dayne, you always write about love ; the 
subject is nauseating." 

" So it is, so it is ; but after all Baudelaire wrote about 
love and lovers ; his best poem — " 

" Cest vrdi, mais il s'agissait d'une charogne et cela releve 
beaucoup la chose." 

I remember, too, a few stray snatches of thy extraor- 



82 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

dinary music, " music that might be considered by Wag- 
ner as a little too advanced, but which Liszt would not 
fail to understand "; also thy settings of sonnets where 
the melody was continued uninterruptedly from the first 
line to the last ; and that still more marvellous feat, thy 
setting, likewise with unbroken melody, of Villon's bal- 
lade " Les Dames du Temps Jadis"; and that out- 
Cabanering of Cabaner, the putting to music of Cros's 
" Hareng Saur." 

And why didst thou remain ever poor and unknown ? 
Because of something too much, or something too lit- 
tle ? Because of something too much ! so I think, at 
least ; thy heart was too full of too pure an ideal, too 
far removed from all possible contagion with the base 
crowd. 

But, Cabaner, thou didst not labor in vain ; thy des- 
tiny, though obscure, was a valiant and fruitful one ; 
and, as in life, thou didst live for others, so now in 
death thou dost live in others. Thou wert in an hour 
of wonder and strange splendor when the last tints 
and lovelinesses of romance lingered in the deepening 
west ; when out of the clear east rose with a mighty 
effulgence of color and lawless light Realism ; when 
showing aloft in the dead pallor of the zenith, like 
a white flag fluttering faintly, Symbolists and Deca- 
dents appeared. Never before was there so sudden 
a flux and conflux of artistic desire, such aspiration 
in the soul of man, such rage of passion, such fainting 
fever, such cerebral erethism. The roar and dust of 
the daily battle of the Realists was continued under the 
flush of the sunset, the arms of the Romantics glittered, 
the pale, spiritual Symbolists watched and waited, none 
knowing yet of their presence. In such an hour of 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 83 

artistic convulsion and renewal of thought thou wert, 
and thou wert a magnificent rallying-point for all 
coiners ; it was thou who didst theorize our confused 
aspirations, and by thy holy example didst save us from 
all base commercialism, from alb hateful prostitution ; 
thou wert ever our high priest, and from thy high altar 
turned to us the white host, the ideal, the true and liv- 
ing God of all men. 

Cabaner, I see you now entering the " Nouvelle 
Athenes"; you are a little tired after your long, weary 
walk, but you lament not and you never cry out against 
the public that will accept neither your music nor your 
poetry. But though you are tired and footsore, you are 
ready to aestheticize till the cafe closes ; for you the 
homeless ones are waiting ; there they are, some three 
or four, and you will take them to your strange room, 
furnished with the American organ, the fountain, and 
the decapitated Venus, and you give them a crust each 
and cover them with what clothes you have ; and, when 
clothes are lacking, with plaster casts, and though you 
will take but a glass of milk yourself, you will find a few 
sous to give them lager to cool their thirsty throats. So 
you have ever lived — a blameless life is yours, no base 
thought has ever entered there, not even a woman's 
love ; art and friends, that is all. 

Reader, do you know of anything more angelic ? If 
you do you are more fortunate than I have been. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE SYNTHESIS OF THE NOUVELLE ATHENES. 

TWO dominant notes in my character — an original 
hatred of my native country, and a brutal loathing 
of the religion I was brought up in. All the aspects of 
my native country are violently disagreeable to me, and 
I cannot think of the place I was born in without a sen- 
sation akin to nausea. These feelings are inherent and 
inveterate in me. I am instinctively averse to my own 
countrymen ; they are at once remote and repulsive ; 
but with Frenchmen I am conscious of a sense of near- 
ness ; I am with them in their ideas and aspirations, and 
when I am with them, I am alive with a keen and pene- 
trating sense of intimacy. Shall I explain this by 
atavism ? Was there a French man or woman in my 
family some half-dozen generations ago ? I have not 
inquired. The English I love, and with a love that is 
foolish — mad, limitless ; I love them better than the 
French, but I am not so near to them. Dear, sweet 
Protestant England, the red tiles of the farmhouse, the 
elms, the great hedgerows, and all the rich fields adorned 
with spreading trees, and the weald and the wold, the 
very words are passionately beautiful . . . southern 
England, not the north — there is something Celtic in the 
north, — southern England, with its quiet, steadfast faces ; 
— a smock frock is to me one of the most delightful things 
in the world ; it is so absolutely English. The villages 

84 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 85 

clustered round the greens, the spires of the churches 
pointing between the elm-trees. . . . This is congenial 
to me ; and this is Protestantism. England is Protest- 
antism, Protestantism is England. Protestantism is 
strong, clean, and westernly, Catholicism is eunuch-like, 
dirty, and Oriental. . . . Yes, Oriental ; there is some- 
thing even Chinese about it. What made England great 
was Protestantism, and when she ceases to be Protest- 
ant she will fall. . . . Look at the nations that have 
clung to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starv- 
ing brigands. The Protestant flag floats on every ocean 
breeze, the Catholic banner hangs limp in the incense 
silence of the Vatican. Let us be Protestant, and revere 
Cromwell. 



Garfon, un bock ! I write to please myself, just as I 
order my dinner ; if my books sell I cannot help it — it 
is an accident. 

But you live by writing. 

Yes, but life is only an accident — art is eternal. 



What I reproach Zola with is that he has no style ; 
there is nothing you won't find in Zola, from Chateau- 
briand to the reporting in the Figaro. 

He seeks immortality in an exact description of a lin- 
endraper's shop ; if the shop conferred immortality it 
should be upon the linendraper who created the shop, 
and not on the novelist who described it. 

And his last novel " l'CEuvre," how terribly spun out, 
and for a franc a line in the " Gil Bias." Not a single 
new or even exact observation. And that terrible phrase 
repeated over and over again — " La Conquete de Paris." 



86 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

What does it mean ? I never knew any one who thought 
of conquering Paris ; — no one ever spoke of conquering 
Paris except, perhaps, two or three provincials. 



You must have rules in poetry, if it is only for the 
pleasure of breaking them, just as you must have women 
dressed, if it is only for the pleasure of imagining them as 
Venuses. 



Fancy, a banquet was given to Julien by his pupils ! 
He made a speech in favor of Lefevre, and hoped that 
every one there would vote for Lefevre. Julien was 
very eloquent. He spoke of Le grand art, le nu, and 
Lefevre's unswerving fidelity to le nu ... elegance, re- 
finement, an echo of ancient Greece : and then, — what 
do you think ? When he had exhausted all the reasons 
why the medal of honor should be accorded to Lefevre, 
he said, " I ask you to remember, gentlemen, that he has 
a wife and eight children." Is it not monstrous ? 



But it is you who are monstrous, you who expect to 
fashion the whole world in conformity with your aesthet- 
icisms ... a vain dream, and if realized it would result 
in an impossible world. A wife and children are the 
basis of existence, and it is folly to cry out because 
an appeal to such interests as these meet with re- 
sponse ... it will be so till the end of time. 



And these great interests that are to continue to the 
end of time began two years ago, when your pictures were 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 87 

not praised in the Figaro as much as you thought they 
should be. 



Marriage — what an abomination ! Love — yes, but 
not marriage. Love cannot exist in marriage, because 
love is an ideal ; that is to say, something not quite 
understood — transparencies, color, light, a sense of 
the unreal. But a wife — you know all about her — 
who her father was, who her mother was, what she 
thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbors over 
the way. Where then, is the dream, the au dela ? 
There is none. I say in marriage an au dela is impos- 
sible. . . . the endless duet of the marble and the 
water, the enervation of burning odors, the baptismal 
whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely 
dark with kohl, names that evoke palm-trees and ruins, 
Spanish moonlight or maybe Persepolis. The monosyl- 
lable which epitomizes the ennui and the prose of our 
lives is heard not, thought not there — only the nightin- 
gale harmony of an eternal yes. Freedom limitless ; the 
Mahometan stands on the verge of the abyss, and the 
spaces of perfume and color extend and invite him with 
the whisper of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the 
unreal. . . . Thus love is possible, there is a delu- 
sion, an au dela. 



Good heavens ! and the world still believes in educa- 
tion, in teaching people the " grammar of art." Educa- 
tion is fatal to any one with a spark of artistic feeling. 
Education should be confined to clerks, and even them 
it drives to drink. Will the world learn that we never 
learn anything that we did not know before ? The artist, 



88 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

the poet, painter, musician, and novelist go straight to the 
food they want, guided by an unerring and ineffable in- 
stinct ; to teach them is to destroy the nerve of the artis- 
tic instinct, it is fatal. But above all in painting ..." cor- 
rect drawing," " solid painting." Is it impossible to teach 
people, to force it into their heads that there is no such 
thing as correct drawing, and that if drawing were cor- 
rect it would be wrong ? Solid painting ; good heavens ! 
Do they suppose that there is one sort of painting that 
is better than all others, and that there is a receipt 
for making it as for making chocolate ! Art is not mathe- 
matics, it is individuality. It does not matter how badly 
you paint, so long as you don't paint badly like other 
people. Education destroys individuality. That great 
studio of Julien's is a sphinx, and all the poor folk that 
go there for artistic education are devoured. After two 
years they all paint and draw alike, every one ; that vile 
execution, — they call it execution, — la pdet, la peinture au 
premier coup. I was over in England last year, and I saw 
some portraits by a man called Richmond. They were 
horrible, but I liked them because they weren't like paint- 
ing. Stott and Sargent are clever fellows enough ; I 
like Stott the best. If they had remained at home and 
hadn't been taught, they might have developed a per- 
sonal art, but the trail of the serpent is over all they do 
— that vile French painting, le morceau, etc. Stott is 
getting over it by degrees. He exhibited a nymph this 
year. I know what he meant ; it was an interesting in- 
tention. I liked his little landscapes better . . . simpli- 
fied into nothing, into a couple of primitive tints, wonder- 
ful clearness, light. But I doubt if he will find a public 
to understand all that. 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 89 

Democratic art ! Art is the direct antithesis to 
democracy .... Athens ! a few thousand citizens 
who owned many thousand slaves, call that democ- 
racy ! No ! what I am speaking of is modern 
democracy — the mass. The mass can only appre- 
ciate simple and naive emotions, puerile prettiness, 
above ah 1 conventionalities. See the Americans that 
come over here ; what do they admire ? Is it Degas or 
Manet they admire ? No, Bouguereau and Lefevre. 
What was most admired at the International Exhibition ? 
— The Dirty Boy. And if the medal of honor had been 
decided by a plebiscite, the dirty boy would have had an 
overwhelming majority. What is the literature of the 
people ? The idiotic stories of the Petit Journal. Don't 
talk of Shakespeare, Moliere, and the masters ; they are 
accepted on the authority of the centuries. If the people 
could understand Hamlet, the people would not read the 
Petit Journal ; if the people could understand Michel 
Angelo, they would not look at our Bouguereau or your 
Bouguereau, Sir F. Leighton. For the last hundred 
years we have been going rapidly towards democracy, 
and what is the result ? The destruction of the handi- 
crafts. That there are still good pictures painted and 
good poems written proves nothing, there will always be 
found men to sacrifice their lives for a picture or a poem. 
But the decorative arts which are executed in collabora- 
tion, and depend for support on the general taste of a 
large number, have ceased to exist. Explain that if you 
can. I'll give you five thousand, ten thousand francs to 
buy a beautiful clock that is not a copy and is not ancient, 
and you can't do it. Such a thing does not exist. Look 
here ; I was going up the staircase of the Louvre the 
other day. They were putting up a mosaic ; it was hor- 



90 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

rible ; every one knows it is horrible. Well, I asked 
who had given the order for this mosaic, and I could not 
rind out ; no one knew. An order is passed from bureau 
to bureau, and no one is responsible ; and it will be 
always so in a republic, and the more republican you are 
the worse it will be. 



The world is dying of machinery ; that is the great 
disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and 
destroy civilization ; man will have to rise against it 
sooner or later. . . . Capital, unpaid labor, wage-slaves, 
and all the rest — stuff. . . . Look at these plates ; they 
were painted by machinery ; they are abominable. Look 
at them. In old times plates were painted by the hand, 
and the supply was necessarily limited to the demand, 
and a china in which there was always something more 
or less pretty was turned out ; but now thousands, mil- 
lions of plates are made more than we want, and there is 
a commercial crisis ; the thing is inevitable. I say the 
great and the reasonable revolution will be when man- 
kind rises in revolt, and smashes the machinery and 
restores the handicrafts. 



Goncourt is not an artist, notwithstanding all his 
affectation and outcries ; he is not an artist. 77 me fait 
Veffet of an old woman shrieking after immortality and 
striving to beat down some fragment of it with a broom. 
Once it was a duet, now it is a solo. They wrote novels, 
history, plays, they collected bric-a-brac — they wrote 
about their bric-a-brac j they painted in water-colors, 
they etched — they wrote about their water-colors and 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 91 

etchings ; they have made a will settling that the bric-a- 
brac is to be sold at their death, and the proceeds applied 
to founding a prize for the best essay or novel, I forget 
which it is. They wrote about the prize they are going 
to found ; they kept a diary, they wrote down every- 
thing they heard, felt, or saw, radotage de vieille femme ; 
nothing must escape, not the slightest word ; it might be 
that very word that might confer on them immortality ; 
everything they heard, or said, must be of value, of 
inestimable value. A real artist does not trouble him- 
self about immortality, about everything he hears, feels, 
and says ; he treats ideas and sensations as so much clay 
wherewith to create. 

And then the famous collaboration ; how it was talked 
about, written about, prayed about ; and when Jules 
died, what a subject for talk for articles ; it all went into 
pot. Hugo's vanity was Titanic, Goncourt's is puerile. 

And Daudet ? 

Oh, Daudet, c'est de la bouillabaisse. 



Whistler, of all artists, is the least impressionist ; the 
idea people have of his being an impressionist only 
proves once again the absolute inability of the public to 
understand the merits or the demerits of artistic work. 
Whistler's art is absolutely classical ; he thinks of nature, 
but he does not see nature ; he is guided by his mind, 
and not by his eyes ; and the best of it is he says so. 
Oh, he knows it well enough ! Any one who knows him 
must have heard him say, " Painting is absolutely scien- 
tific ; it is an exact science." And his work is in accord 
with his theory ; he risks nothing, all is brought down, 
arranged, balanced, and made one, — a well-determined 



92 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

mental conception. I admire his work ; I am merely 
showing how he is misunderstood, even by those who 
think they understand. Does he ever seek a pose that 
is characteristic of the model, a pose that the model 
repeats oftener than any other ? — Never. He advances 
the foot, puts the hand on the hip, etc., with a view to 
rendering his idea. Take his portrait of Duret. Did he 
ever see Duret in dress clothes ? Probably not. Did he 
ever see Duret with a lady's opera cloak ? — I am sure he 
never did. Is Duret in the habit of going to the theatre 
with ladies ? No ; he is a litterateur who is always in 
men's society, rarely in ladies'. But these facts mat- 
tered nothing to Whistler as they matter to Degas, 
or to Manet. Whistler took Duret out of his environ- 
ment, dressed him up, thought out a scheme — in a word, 
painted his idea without concerning himself in the 
least with the model. Mark you, I deny that I am 
urging any fault or flaw ; I am merely contending 
that Whistler's art is not modern art, but classic art — 
yes, and severely classical, far more classical than Titian's 
or Velasquez ; — from an opposite pole as classical as 
Ingres. No Greek dramatist ever sought the synthesis 
of things more uncompromisingly than Whistler. And 
he is right. Art is not nature. Art is nature digested. 
Art is a sublime excrement. Zola and Goncourt cannot 
or will not understand that the artistic stomach must be 
allowed to do its work in its own mysterious fashion. If 
a man is really an artist he will remember what is neces- 
sary, forget what is useless ; but if he takes notes he 
will interrupt his artistic digestion, and the result will be 
a lot of little touches, inchoate and wanting in the ele- 
gant rhythm of the synthesis. 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 93 

I am sick of synthetical art ; we want observation 
direct and unreasoned. What I reproach Millet with is 
that it is always the same thing, the same peasant, the 
same sabot, the same sentiment. You must admit that 
it is somewhat stereotyped. 



What does that matter ; what is more stereotyped 
than Japanese art ? But that does not prevent it from 
bein,g always beautiful. 



People talk of Manet's originality ; that is just what I 
can't see. What he has got, and what you can't take 
away from him, is a magnificent execution. A piece of 
still life by Manet is the most wonderful thing in the 
world ; vividness of color, breadth, simplicity, and direct- 
ness of touch — marvellous ! 



French translation is the only translation ; in England 
you still continue to translate poetry into poetry, instead 
of into prose. We used to do the same, but we have 
long ago renounced such follies. Either of two things — 
if the translator is a good poet, he substitutes his verse 
for that of the original ; — I don't want his verse, I want 
the original ; — if he is a bad poet, he gives us bad verse, 
which is intolerable. Where the original poet put an 
effect of caesura, the translator puts an effect of rhyme ; 
where the original puts an effect of rhyme, the translator 
puts an effect of caesura. Take Longfellow's " Dante." 
Does it give as good an idea of the original as our prose 
translation ? Is it as interesting reading ? Take Bayard 
Taylor's translation of " Goethe." Is it readable ? Not 



94 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

to any one with an ear for verse. Will any one say that 
Taylor's would be read if the original did not exist. The 
fragment translated by Shelley is beautiful, but then it is 
Shelley. Look at Swinburne's translations of Villon. 
They are beautiful poems by Swinburne, that is all ; he 
makes Villon speak of a " splendid kissing mouth." Vil- 
lon could not have done this unless he had read Swin- 
burne. " Heine," translated by James Thomson, is not 
different from Thomson's original poems ; " Heine," 
translated by Sir Theodore Martin, is doggerel. 



But in English blank verse you can translate quite 
as literally as you could into prose ? 



I doubt it, but even so, the rhythm of the blank line 
would carry your mind away from that of the original. 



But if you don't know the original ? 



The rhythm of the original can be suggested in prose 
judiciously used ; even if it isn't, your mind is at least 
free, whereas the English rhythm must destroy the sen- 
sation of something foreign. There is no translation ex- 
cept a word-for-word translation. Baudelaire's transla- 
tion of Poe, and Hugo's translation of Shakespeare, are 
marvellous in this respect ; a pun or joke that is untrans- 
latable is explained in a note. 



But that is the way young ladies translate — word for 
word ! 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 95 

No ; 'tis just what they don't do ; they think they are 
translating word for word, but they aren't. All the 
proper names, no matter how unpronounceable, must be 
rigidly adhered to ; you must never transpose versts into 
kilometres, or roubles into francs ; — I don't know what a 
verst is or what a rouble is, but when I see the words I 
am in Russia. Every proverb must be rendered liter- 
ally, even if it doesn' t make very good sense ; if it 
doesn't make sense at all, it must be explained in a note. 
For example, there is a proverb in German : " Quand 
le cheval est selle il faut le monter "/ in French there is 
a proverb : " Quand le vin est tire' ilfaut le boire" Well, 
a translator who would translate quand I e cheval, etc., by 
quand le vin, etc., is an ass, and does not know his busi- 
ness. In translation only a strictly classical language 
should be used ; no word of slang, or even word of mod- 
ern origin should be employed ; the translator's aim 
should be never to dissipate the illusion of an exotic. If 
I were translating the " Assommoir " into English, I 
should strive after a strong, flexible, but colorless lan- 
guage, something — what shall I say ? — a sort of a mod- 
ern Addison. 



What, don't you know the story about Mendes ? — when 
Chose wanted to marry his sister ? Chose 's mother, it ap- 
pears, went to live with a priest. The poor fellow was 
dreadfully cut up ; he was broken-hearted ; and he went 
to Mendes, his heart swollen with grief, determined to 
make a clean breast of it, let the worst come to the worst. 
After a great deal of beating about the bush, and apolo- 
gizing, he got it out. You know Mendes, you can see 
him smiling a little ; and looking at Chose with that white 



y 



96 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

cameo face of his he said, " Avec quel meilleur homme 
voulez-vous que voire mere se Jit ? vous riavez done, jeune 
homme, aucun sentiment religieux" 



Victor Hugo, he is a painter on porcelain ; his verse 
is mere decoration, long tendrils and flowers ; and the 
same thing over and over again. 



How to be happy ! — not to read Baudelaire and Ver- 
laine, not to enter the " Nouvelle Athenes," unless per- 
haps to play dominoes like the bourgeois over there, not 
to do anything that would awake a too intense conscious- 
ness of life, — to live in a sleepy country-side, to have a 
garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter 
quietly every evening over the details o f existence. We 
must have the azaleas out to-morrow and thoroughly 
cleansed, they are devoured by insects ; the tame rook 
has flown away ; mother lost her prayer-book coming 
from church, she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, 
well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must 
be very nearly happy ; — and to think there are people 
who would educate, who would draw these people out of 
the calm satisfaction of their instincts, and give them 
passions ! The philanthropist is the Nero of modern 
times. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

EXTRACT FROM A LETTER. 

W T^Y did you not send a letter ? We have all been 
VV writing to you for the last six months, but no 
answer — none. Had you written one word I would have 
saved all. The poor concierge was in despair ; she said 
the proprittaire would wait if you had only said when 
you were coming back, or if you only had let us know 
what you wished to be done. Three quarters rent was 
due, and no news could be obtained of you, so an auction 
had to be called. It nearly broke my heart to see those 
horrid men tramping over the delicate carpets, their 
coarse faces set against the sweet color of that beautiful 
English cretonne. . . . And all the while the pastel by 
Manet, the great hat set like an aureole about the face — 
' the eyes deep set in crimson shadow,' ' the fan wide- 
spread across the bosom ' (you see I am quoting your 
own words), looking down, the mistress of that little 
paradise of tapestry. She seemed to resent the intru- 
sion. I looked once or twice half expecting those eyes 
'deep set in crimson shadow' to fill with tears. But 
nothing altered her great dignity ; she seemed to see all, 
but as a Buddha she remained impenetrable. . . . 

" I was there the night before the sale. I looked 
through the books, taking notes of those I intended to 
buy — those which we used to read together when the 
snow lay high about the legs of the poor faun in terre 

97 



98 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

cuite y that laughed amid the frosty boulingrins. I found 
a large packet of letters which I instantly destroyed. 
You should not be so careless ; I wonder how it is that 
men are always careless about their letters. 

" The sale was announced for one o'clock. I wore a 
thick veil, for I did not wish to be recognized ; the con- 
cierge of course knew me, but she can be depended 
upon. The poor old woman was in tears, so sorry was 
she to see all your pretty things sold up. You left owing 
her a hundred francs, but I have paid her ; and talking 
of you we waited till the auctioneer arrived. Everything 
had been pulled down ; the tapestry from the walls, the 
picture, the two vases I gave you were on the table 
waiting the stroke of the hammer. And then the men, 
all the marchands de meubles in the quartier, came up- 
stairs, spitting and talking coarsely — their ' foul voices 
went through me. They stamped, spat, pulled the 
things about, nothing escaped them. One of them held 
up the Japanese dressing-gown and made some horrible 
jokes ; and the auctioneer, who was a humorist, answered, 
"If there are any ladies' men present, we shall have 
some spirited bidding." The pastel I bought, and I 
shall keep it and try to find some excuse to satisfy my 
husband, but I send you the miniature, and I hope you 
will not let it be sold again. There were many 
other things I should have liked to have bought but I 
did not dare — the organ that you used to play hymns 
on and I waltzes on, the Turkish lamp which we could 
never agree about. . . . but when I saw the satin shoes 
which I gave you to carry the night of that adorable 
ball, and which you would not give back, but nailed 
up on the wall on either side of your bed and put 
matches in, I was seized with an almost invincible 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 99 

desire to steal them. I don't know why, un caprice 
de fcmme. No one but you would have ever thought 
of converting satin shoes into match-boxes. I 
wore them at that delicious ball ; we danced all 
night together, and you had an explanation with 
my husband (I was a little afraid for a moment, 
but it came out all right), and we went and sat 
on the balcony in the soft warm moonlight ; we 
watched the glitter of epaulets and gas, the satin of the 
bodices, the whiteness of passing shoulders ; we dreamed 
the massy darknesses of the park, the fairy light along 
the lawny spaces, the heavy perfume of the flowers, the 
pink of the camellias ; and you quoted something : 
' les camelias dn balcon i-essemblent a des d/sirs mour ants' 
It was horrid of you : but you always had a knack of 
rubbing one up the wrong way. Then do you not 
remember how we danced in one room, while the ser- 
vants set the other out with little tables ? That supper 
was fascinating! I suppose it was these pleasant re- 
membrances which made me wish for the shoes, but I 
could not summon up courage enough to buy them, and 
the horrid people were comparing me with the pastel ; 
I suppose I did look a little mysterious with a double 
veil bound across my face. The shoes went with a lot 
of other things — and oh, to whom ? 

" So now that pretty little retreat in the Rue de la 
Tour des Dames is ended for ever for you and me. We 
shall not see the faun in terre cuite again ; I was think- 
ing of going to see him the other day, but the street is 
so steep ; my coachman advised me to spare the horse's 
hind-legs. I believe it is the steepest street in Paris. 
And your luncheon parties, how I did enjoy them, and 
how Fay did enjoy them too ; and what I risked, short- 



IOO CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

sighted as I am, picking my way from the tramcar down 
to that out-of-the-way little street ! Men never appre- 
ciate the risks women run for them. But to leave my 
letters lying about — I cannot forgive that. When I told 
Fay she said, ' What can you expect ? I warned you 
against flirting with boys.' I never did before — never. 

" Paris is now just as it was when you used to sit on 
the balcony and I read you Browning. You never liked 
his poetry, and I cannot understand why. I have found 
a new poem which I am sure would convert you ; you 
should be here. There are lilacs in the room, and the 
Mont Valerien is beautiful upon a great lemon sky, and 
the long avenue is merging into violet vapor. 

" We have already begun to think of where we shall 
go to this year. Last year we went to P , an enchant- 
ing place, quite rustic, but within easy distance of a 
casino. I had vowed not to dance, for I had been out 
every night during the season, but the temptation proved 
irresistible, and I gave way. There were two young 
men here, one the Count of B , the other the Mar- 
quis of G , one of the best families in France, a 

distant cousin of my husband. He has written a book 
which every one says is one of the most amusing things 
that has appeared for years, c'est surtout trh Parisien. 
He paid me great attentions, and made my husband 
wildly jealous. I used to go out and sit with him amid 
the rocks, and it was perhaps very lucky for me that he 
went away. We may return there this year ; if so, I 
wish you would come and spend a month ; there is an 
excellent hotel where you would be very comfortable. 

We have decided nothing as yet. The Duchesse de 

is giving a costume ball ; they say it is going to be a 
most wonderful affair. I don't know what money is not 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. IOI 

going to be spent upon the cotillion. I have just got 
home a fascinating toilette. I am going as a Pierroitej 
you know, a short skirt and a little cap. The Marquise 
gave a ball some few days ago. I danced the cotillion 

with L , who, as you know, dances divinely ; il via 

fait la cour, but it is of course no use, you know that 

" The other night we went to see the Maitre- Forges, 
a fascinating play, and I am reading the book ; I don't 
know which I like the best. I think the play, but the 
book is very good too. Now that is what I call a novel ; 
and I am a judge, for I have read all novels. But I 
must not talk literature, or you will say something stu- 
pid. I wish you would not make foolish remarks about 
men that tout- Paris considers the cleverest. It does not 
matter so much with me, I know you, but then people 
laugh at you behind your back, and that is not nice for 
me. The marquise was here the other day, and she said 
she almost wished you would not come on her ' days,' 
so extraordinary were the remarks you made. And by 
the way, the marquise has written a book. I have not 
seen it, but I hear that it is really too de'collete'. She is 
une femme aV esprit, but the way she affiche's herself is 
too much for any one. She never goes anywhere now 
without le petit D . It is a great pity. 

" And now, my dear friend, write me a nice letter, and 
tell me when you are coming back to Paris. I am sure 
you cannot amuse yourself in that hateful London ; the 
nicest thing about you was that you were really tres 
Parisien. Come back and take a nice apartment on the 
Champs Elysees. You might come back for the Duch- 
esse's ball. I will get an invitation for you, and will 
keep the cotillion for you. The idea of running away 
as you did, and never telling any one where you were 



102 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

going to. I always said you were a little cracked. And 
letting all your things be sold ! If you had only told 
me ! I should like so much to have had that Turkish 
lamp. Yours " 

How like her that letter is — egotistical, vain, foolish ; 
no, not foolish — narrow, limited, but not foolish ; 
worldly, oh, how worldly ! and yet not repulsively so, 
for there always was in her a certain intensity of feeling 
that saved her from the commonplace, and gave her an 
inexpressible charm. Yes, she is a woman who can feel, 
and she has lived her life and felt it very acutely, 
very sincerely — sincerely ? . . . like a moth caught in a 
gauze curtain ! Well, would that preclude sincerity ? 
Sincerity seems to convey an idea of depth, and 
she was not very deep, that is quite certain. I never 
could understand her ; — a little brain that span rapidly 
and hummed a pretty humming tune. But no, there 
was something more in her than that. She often said 
things that I thought clever, things that I did not forget, 
things that I should like to put into books. But it was 
not brain power ; it was only intensity of feeling — ner- 
vous feeling. I don't know . . . perhaps. . . . She 
has lived her life . . . yes, within certain limits she has 
lived her life. None of us do more than that. True. 
I remember the first time I saw her. Sharp, little, and 
merry — a changeable little sprite. I thought she had 
ugly hands ; so she has, and yet I forgot all about her 
hands before I had known her a month. It is now 
seven years ago. How time passes ! I was very young 
then. What battles we have had, what quarrels ! Still 
we had good times together. She never lost signt of 
me, but no intrusion ; far too clever for that. I never 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 107 

compared with the essential that I should have La Source, 
that exquisite dream of innocence, to think of till my soul 
is sick with delight of the painter's holy vision. Nay 
more, the knowledge that a wrong was done — that mill- 
ions of Israelites died in torments, that a girl, or a thou- 
sand girls, died in the hospital for that one virginal thing, 
is an added pleasure which I could not afford to spare. 
Oh, for the silence of marble courts, for the shadow of 
great pillars, for gold, for reticulated canopies of lilies ; 
to see the great gladiators pass, to hear them cry the 
famous " Ave Caesar," to hold the thumb down, to see 
the blood flow, to fill the languid hours with the agonies 
of poisoned slaves ! Oh, for excess, for crime ! I would 
give many lives to save one sonnet by Baudelaire ; for 
the hymn, "A la tres-chere, a la tres-belle, qui remplit 
mon coeur de clartc" let the first-born in every house in 
Europe be slain ; and in all sincerity I profess my readi- 
ness to decapitate all the Japanese in Japan and else- 
where, to save from destruction one drawing by Hokee. 
Again I say that all we deem sublime in the world's his- 
tory are acts of injustice ; and it is certain that if man- 
kind does not relinquish at once, and for ever, its vain, 
mad, and fatal dream of justice, the world will lapse into 
barbarism. England was great and glorious, because 
England was unjust, and England's greatest son was the 
personification of injustice — Cromwell. 

But the old world of heroes is over now. The skies 
above us are dark with sentimentalism, the sand beneath 
us is shoaling fast, we are running with streaming canvas 
upon ruin ; all ideals have gone ; nothing remains to us 
for worship but the Mass, the blind, inchoate, insatiate 
Mass ; fog and fen land before us, we shall founder in 
putrefying mud, creatures of the ooze and rushes about 



108 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

us — we, the great ship that has floated up from the an- 
tique world. Oh, for the antique world, its plain passion, 
its plain joys in the sea, where the Triton blew a plain- 
tive blast, and the forest where the whiteness of the 
nymph was seen escaping ! We are weary of pity, we 
are weary of being good ; we are weary of tears and 
effusion, and our refuge — the British Museum — is the wide 
sea-shore and the wind of the ocean. There, there is 
real joy in the flesh ; our statues are naked, but we are 
ashamed, and our nakedness is indecency : a fair, frank 
soul is mirrored in those fauns and nymphs ; and how 
strangely enigmatic is the soul of the antique world, the 
bare, barbarous soul of beauty and of might ! 



CHAPTER IX. 

BUT neither Apollo nor Buddha could help or save 
me. One in his exquisite balance of body, a sky- 
lark-like song of eternal beauty, stood lightly advancing ; 
the other sat sombrously contemplating, calm as a beauti- 
ful evening. I looked for sorrow in the eyes of the 
pastel — the beautiful pastel that seemed to fill with a real 
presence the rich autumnal leaves where the jays darted 
and screamed. The twisted columns of the bed rose, 
burdened with great weight of fringes and curtains ; the 
python devoured a guinea-pig, the last I gave him ; the 
great white cat came to me. I said all this must go, 
must henceforth be to me an abandoned dream, a some- 
thing, not more real than a summer meditation. So be 
it, and, as was characteristic of me, I broke with Paris 
suddenly, without warning any one. I knew in my heart 
of hearts that I should never return, but no word was 
spoken, and I continued a pleasant delusion with myself; 
I told my concierge that I would return in a month, and 
I left all to be sold, brutally sold by auction, as the letter 
I read in the last chapter charmingly and touchingly 
describes. 

Not even to Marshall did I confide my foreboding that 
Paris would pass out of my life, that it would henceforth 
be with me a beautiful memory, but never more a prac- 
tical delight. He and I were no longer living together ; 
we had parted a second time, but this time without bit- 
terness of any kind; he had learned to feel that I wanted 

iog 



IIO CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

to live alone, and had moved away into the Latin quarter, 
whither I made occasional expeditions. I accompanied 
him once to the old haunts, but various terms of penal 
servitude had scattered our friends, and I could not 
interest myself in the new. Nor did Marshall himself 
interest me as he had once done. To my eager taste, 
he had grown just a little trite. My affection for him 
was as deep and sincere as ever ; were I to meet him 
now I would grasp his hand and hail him with firm, loyal 
friendship ; but I had made friends in the Nouvelle 
Athenes who interested me passionately, and my thoughts 
were absorbed by and set on new ideals, which Marshall 
had failed to find sympathy for, or even to understand. 
I had introduced him to Degas and Manet, but he had 
spoken of Jules Lefevre and Bouguereau, and generally 
shown himself incapable of any higher education ; he 
could not enter where I had entered, and this was alien- 
ation. We could no longer even talk of the same people; 
when I spoke of a certain marquise, he answered with an 
indifferent " Do you really think so ? " and proceeded to 
drag me away from my glitter of satin to the dinginess of 
print dresses. It was more than alienation, it was almost 
separation; but he was still my friend, he was the man, 
and he always will be, to whom my youth, with all its 
aspirations, was most closely united. So I turned to say 
good-bye to him and to my past life. Rap — rap—rap ! 

" Who's there ? " 

" I — Dayne." 

" I've got a model." 

" Never mind your model. Open the door. How are 
you ? what are you painting ? ' 

" This ; what do you think of it ? " 

" It is prettily composed. I think it will come out all 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. Ill 

right. I am going to England ; come to say good- 
bye." 

" Going to England ! What will you do in England ?" 

" I have to go about money matters ; very tiresome. I 
had really begun to forget there was such a place." 

" But you are not going to stay there ? " 

"Oh,- no !" 

" You will be just in time to see the Academy." 

The conversation turned on art, and we aestheticized 
for an hour. At last Marshall said, " I am really sorry, 
old chap, but I must send you away ; there's that 
model." 

The girl sat waiting, her pale hair hanging down her 
back, a very picture of discontent. 

" Send her away." 

" I asked her to come out to dinner." 

" D — n her . . . Well, never mind, I must spend this 
last evening with you ; you shall both dine with me. 
Je quitte Paris demain matin, peut-etre pour longtemps ;je 
voudrais passer ma derniere soiree avec mon ami; alors si 
vous voulez bien me permettre, mademoiselle ; je vous invite 
tons les deux a diner; nous passerons la soiree ensemble si 
cela vous est agreeable ? 

" Je veux bien, monsieur." 

Poor Marie ! Marshall and I were absorbed in each 
other and art. It was always so. We dined in a gar- 
gotte, and afterwards we went to a students' ball ; and it 
seems like yesterday. I can see the moon sailing through 
a clear sky, and on the pavement's edge Marshall's beau- 
tiful, slim, manly figure, and Marie's exquisite graceful- 
ness. She was Lefevre's Chloe ; so every one sees her 
now. Her end was a tragic one. She invited her friends 
to dinner, and with the few pence that remained she 



112 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

bought some boxes of matches, boiled them, and drank 
the water. No one knew why ; some said it was love. 

I went to London in an exuberant necktie, a tiny hat ; 
I wore large trousers and a Capoul beard ; and I looked, 
I believe, as unlike an Englishman as a drawing by 
Gr6vin. In the smoking-room of Morley's Hotel I met 
my agent, an immense nose, and a wisp of hair drawn 
over a bald skull. He explained, after some hesitation, 
that I owed him a few thousands, and that the accounts 
were in his portmanteau. I suggested taking them to a 
solicitor to have them examined. The solicitor advised 
me strongly to contest them. I did not take the advice, 
but raised some money instead, and so the matter ended 
so far as the immediate future was concerned. The 
years the most impressionable, from twenty to thirty, 
when the senses and the mind are the widest awake, I, 
the most impressionable of human beings, had spent in 
France, not among English residents, but among that 
which is the quintessence of the nation ; I, not an in- 
different spectator, but an enthusiast, striving heart and 
soul to identify himself with his environment, to shake 
himself free from race and language and to recreate 
himself as it were in the womb of a new nationality, 
assuming its ideals, its morals, and its modes of thought, 
and I had succeeded strangely well, and when I returned 
home England was a new country to me ; I had, as it 
were, forgotten everything. Every aspect of street and 
suburban garden was new to me ; of the manner of 
life of Londoners I knew nothing. This sounds incred- 
ible, but it is so ; I saw, but I could realize nothing. I 
went into a drawing-room, but everything seemed far 
away — a dream, a presentment, nothing more ; I was in 
touch with nothing ; of the thoughts and feelings of 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 113 

those I met I could understand nothing, nor could I 
sympathize with them : an Englishman was at that time 
as much out of my mental reach as an Esquimau would 
be now. Women were nearer to me than men, and I will 
take this opportunity to note my observation, for I am 
not aware that any one else has observed that the differ- 
ence between the two races is found in the men, not in 
the women. French and English women are psycho- 
logically very similar ; the standpoint from which they 
see life is the same, the same thoughts interest and 
amuse them ; but the attitude of a Frenchman's mind is 
absolutely opposed to that of an Englishman ; they 
stand on either side of a vast abyss, two animals different 
in color, form, and temperament ; — two ideas destined 
to remain irrevocably separate and distinct. 

I have heard of writing and speaking two languages 
equally well : this was impossible to me, and I am con- 
vinced that if I had remained two more years in France 
I should never have been able to identify my thoughts 
with the language I am now writing in, and I should 
have written it as an alien. As it was I only just escaped 
this detestable fate. And it was in the last two years, 
when I began to write French verse and occasional 
chroniques in the papers, that the great damage was done. 
I remember very well indeed one day, while arranging 
an act of a play I was writing with a friend, finding sud- 
denly to my surprise that I could think more easily and 
rapidly in French than in English ; but with all this I 
did not learn French. I chattered, and I felt intensely 
at home in it ; yes, I could write a sonnet or a ballade 
almost without a slip, but my prose required a good deal 
of alteration, for a greater command of language is 
required to write in prose than in verse. I found this in 



114 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

French and also in English. For when I returned from 
Paris, my English terribly corrupt with French ideas and 
forms of thought, I could write acceptable English verse, 
but even ordinary newspaper prose was beyond my reach, 
and an attempt I made to write a novel drifted into a 
miserable failure ; but the following poems opened to 
me the doors of a first-class London newspaper, and I 
was at once entrusted with some important critical work : 

THE SWEETNESS OF THE PAST. 

As sailors watch from their prison 
For the faint gray line of the coasts, 

I look to the past re-arisen, 
And joys come over in hosts 

Like the white sea birds from their roosts. 

I love not the indelicate present, 

The future's unknown to our quest, 
To-day is the life of the peasant, 

But the past is a haven of rest — 
The things of the past are the best. 

The rose of the past is better 

Than the rose we ravish to-day, 
'Tis holier, purer, and fitter 

To place on the shrine where we pray 
For the secret thoughts we obey. 

There are there no deceptions or changes, 

And there all is lovely and still ; 
No grief nor fate that estranges, 

Nor hope that no life can fulfil, 
But ethereal shelter from ill. 

The coarser delights of the hour 

Tempt, and debauch, and deprave, 
And we joy in a poisonous flower, 

Knowing that nothing can save 
Our flesh from the fate of the grave. 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 115 

But sooner or later returning 

In grief to the well-loved nest, 
Our souls filled with infinite yearning, 

We cry, in the past there is rest, 
There is peace, its joys are the best. 

NOSTALGIA. 

Fair were the dreamful days of old, 

When in the summer's sleepy shade, 
Beneath the beeches on the wold, 

The shepherds lay and gently played 
Music to maidens, who, afraid, 

Drew all together rapturously, 
Their white soft hands like white leaves laid, 

In the old dear days of Arcady. 

Men were not then as they are now 

Haunted and terrified by creeds, 
They sought not then, nor cared to know 

The end that as a magnet leads, 
Nor told with austere fingers beads, 

Nor reasoned with their grief and glee, 
But rioted in pleasant meads 

In the old dear days of Arcady. 

The future may be wrong or right, 

The present is distinctly wrong, 
For life and love have lost delight, 

And bitter even is our song ; 
And year by year gray doubt grows strong, 

And death is all that seems to dree. 
Wherefore with weary hearts we long 

For the old dear days of Arcady. 

ENVOI. 

Glories and triumphs ne'er shall cease, 
But men may sound the heavens and sea, 

One thing is lost for aye — the peace 
Of the old dear days of Arcady. 



Il6 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

And so it was that I came to settle down in a Strand 
lodging-house, determined to devote myself to literature, 
and to accept the hardships of a literary life. I had 
been playing long enough, and now I was resolved to see 
what I could do in the world of work. I was anxious 
for proof, peremptory proof, of my capacity or incapac- 
ity. A book ! No. I required an immediate answer, 
and journalism alone could give me that. So I reasoned 
in the Strand lodging-house. And what led me to that 
house ? Chance, or a friend's recommendation ? I for- 
get. It was uncomfortable, hideous, and not very clean : 
but curious, as all things are curious when examined 
closely. Let me tell you about my rooms. The sitting- 
room was a good deal longer than it was wide ; it was 
panelled with deal, and the deal was painted a light 
brown ; behind it there was a large bedroom : the floor 
was covered with a ragged carpet, and a big bed stood 
in the middle of the floor. But next to the sitting-room 
was a small bedroom which was let for ten shillings a 
week ; and the partition wall was so thin that I could 
hear every movement the occupant made. This proxim- 
ity was intolerable, and eventually I decided on adding 
ten shillings to my rent, and I became the possessor of 
the entire flat. In the room above me lived a pretty 
young woman, an actress at the Savoy Theatre. She 
had a piano, and she used to play and sing in the morn- 
ings, and in the afternoon, friends — girls from the 
theatre — used to come and see her ; and Emma, the 
maid-of-all-work, used to take them up their tea ; and, 

oh ! the chattering and the laughter. Poor Miss L ; 

she had only two pounds a week to live on, but she was 
always in high spirits except when she could not pay the 
hire of her piano ; and I am sure that she now looks 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 117 

back with pleasure and thinks of those days as very 
happy ones. 

She was a tall girl, a thin figure, and she had large 
brown eyes ; she liked young men, and she hoped that 
Mr. Gilbert would give her a line or two in his next 
opera. Often have I come out on the landing to meet 
her ; we used to sit on those stairs talking, long after 
midnight, of what ? — of our landlady, of the theatre, of 
the most suitable ways of enjoying ourselves in life. 
One night she told me she was married ; it was a solemn 
moment. I asked in a sympathetic voice why she was 
not living with her husband. She told me, but the rea- 
son of the separation I have forgotten in the many 
similar reasons for separations and partings which have 
since been confided to me. The landlady bitterly 

resented our intimacy, and I believe Miss L was 

charged indirectly for her conversations with me in the 
bill. On the first floor there was a large sitting-room 
and bedroom, solitary rooms that were nearly always 
unlet. The landlady's parlor was on the ground floor, 
her bedroom was next to it, and further on was the 
entrance to the kitchen stairs, whence ascended Mrs. 

S 's brood of children, and Emma, the awful servant, 

with tea things, many various smells, that of ham and 
eggs predominating. 

Emma, I remember you — you are not to be forgotten — 
up at five o'clock every morning, scouring, washing, 
cooking, dressing those infamous children ; seventeen 
hours at least out of the twenty-four at the beck and call 
of landlady, lodgers, and quarrelling children ; seventeen 
hours at least out of the twenty-four drudging in that 
horrible kitchen, running up stairs with coals and break- 
fasts and cans of hot water ; down on your knees before 



Il8 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

a grate, pulling out the cinders with those hands — can I 
call them hands ? The lodgers sometimes threw you a 
kind word, but never one that recognized that you were 
akin to us, only the pity that might be extended to a 
dog. And I used to ask you all sorts of cruel questions ; 
I was curious to know the depth of animalism you had 
sunk to, or rather out of which you had never been 
raised. And you generally answered innocently and 
naively enough. But sometimes my words were too 
crude, and they struck through the thick hide into the 
quick, into the human, and you winced a little ; but this 
was rarely, for you were very nearly, oh, very nearly an 
animal : your temperament and intelligence was just 
that of a dog that has picked up a master ; not a real 
master, but a makeshift master who may turn it out at 
any moment. Dickens would sentimentalize or laugh 
over you ; I do neither. I merely recognize you as one 
of the facts of civilization. You looked — well, to be 
candid, — you looked neither young nor old ; hard work 
had obliterated the delicate markings of the years, and 
left you in round numbers something over thirty. Your 
hair was reddish brown, and your face wore that plain 
honest look that is so essentially English. The rest of 
you was a mass of stuffy clothes, and when you rushed 
upstairs I saw something that did not look like legs ; a 
horrible rush that was of yours, a sort of cart-horse-like 
bound. I have spoken angrily to you ; I have heard 
others speak angrily to you, but never did that sweet face 
of yours, for it was a sweet face — that sweet, natural 
goodness that is so sublime — lose its expression of per- 
fect and unfailing kindness. Words convey little sense 
of the real horrors of the reality. Life in your case 
meant this : to be born in a slum, and to leave it to work 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 119 

seventeen hours a day in a lodging-house ; to be a Lon- 
doner, but to know only the slum in which you were born 
and the few shops in the Strand at which the landlady 
dealt. To know nothing of London meant in your case 
not to know that it was not England ; England and 
London ! you could not distinguish between them. 
Was England an island or a mountain ? you had no 

notion. I remember when you heard that Miss L 

was going to America, you asked me, and the question 
was sublime : " Is she going to travel all night ? " 
You had heard people speak of travelling all night, and 
that was all you knew of travel or any place that was 
not the Strand. I asked you if you went to church, and 
you said " No, it makes my eyes bad." I said, " But 
you don't read ; you can't read." " No, but I have to 
look at the book." I asked you if you had heard of 
God ; you hadn't ; but when I pressed you on the point 
you suspected I was laughing at you, and you would not 
answer, and when I tried you again on the subject I 
could see that the landlady had been telling you what to 
say. But you had not understood, and your conscious 
ignorance, grown conscious within the last couple of 
days, was even more pitiful than your unconscious igno- 
rance when you answered that you couldn't go to church 
because it made your eyes bad. It is a strange thing to 
know nothing ; for instance, to live in London and to 
have no notion of the House of Commons, nor indeed of 
the Queen, except perhaps that she is a rich lady ; the 
police — yes, you knew what a policeman was because you 
used to be sent to fetch one to make an organ-man or a 
Christy minstrel move on. To know of nothing but a 
dark kitchen, grates, eggs and bacon, dirty children ; to 
work seventeen hours a day and to get cheated out of 



120 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

your wages ; to answer, when asked, why you did not 
get your wages or leave if you weren't paid, that you 

" didn't know how Mrs. S would get on without 

me. 

This woman owed you forty pounds, I think, so I cal- 
culated it from what you told me ; and yet you did not like 
to leave her because you did not know how she would get 
on without you. Sublime stupidity ! At this point your 
intelligence stopped. I remember you once spoke of a 
half-holiday : I questioned you, and I found your idea of 
a half-holiday was to take the children for a walk and 
buy them some sweets. I told my brother of this and 
he said — Emma out for a half-holiday ! why, you might 
as well give a mule a holiday. The phrase was brutal, 
but it was admirably descriptive of you. Yes, you are a 
mule ; there is no sense in you ; you are a beast of bur- 
den, a drudge too horrible for anything but work ; and I 
suppose, all things considered, that the fat landlady with 
a dozen children did well to work you. seventeen hours a 
day, and cheat you out of your miserable wages. You 
had no friends ; you could not have a friend unless it 
were some forlorn cat or dog ; but you once spoke to me 
of your brother, who worked in a potato store, and I was 
astonished, and I wondered if he were as awful as you. 
Poor Emma ! I shall never forget your kind heart and 
your unfailing good-humor ; you were born beautifully 
good as a rose is born with perfect perfume ; you were 
as unconscious of your goodness as the rose of its per- 
fume. And you were taken by this fat landlady as 'Arry 
takes a rose and sticks it in his tobacco-reeking coat ; 
and you will be thrown away, shut out of doors when 
health fails you, or when, overcome by base usage, you 
take to drink. There is no hope for you ; even if you 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 121 

were treated better and paid your wages there would be 
no hope. That forty pounds even, if they were given to 
you, would bring you no good fortune. They would 
bring the idle loafer, who scorns you now as something 
too low for even his kisses, hanging about your heels and 
whispering in your ears. And his whispering would 
drive you mad, for your kind heart longs for kind words ; 
and then when he had spent your money and cast you 
off in despair, the gin shop and the river would do the 
rest. Providence is very wise after all, and your best 
destiny is your present one. We cannot add a pain, nor 
can we take away a pain ; we may alter, but we cannot 
subtract nor even alleviate. But what truisms are these ; 
who believes in philanthropy nowadays ? 

* * * * * * 

"Come in." 

" Oh, it is you, Emma ! " 

" Are you going to dine at home to-day, sir ? " 

"What can I have?" 

" Well, yer can 'ave a chop or a steak." 

" Anything else ?" 

" Yes, yer can 'ave a steak, or a chop, or — " 

" Oh yes, I know ; well then, I'll have a chop. And 
now tell me, Emma, how is your young man ? I hear 
you have got one, you went out with him the other 
night." 

" Who told yer that ? " 

" Ah, never mind ; I hear everything." 

" I know, from Miss L — -." 

11 Well, tell me, how did you meet him ; who introduced 
him ? " 

" I met 'im as I was a-coming from the public 'ouse 
with the beer for missus' dinner." 



122 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

" And what did he say ? " 

" He asked me if I was engaged ; I said no. And he 
come round down the lane that evening." 

" And he took you out ? " 

"Yes." 

" And where did you go ? " 

" We went for a walk on the Embankment." 

" And when is he coming for you again ? " 

" He said he was coming last evening, but he didn't." 

" Why didn't he ? " 

" I dunno ; I suppose because I haven't time to go out 

with him. So it was Miss L that told you ; well, 

you do 'ave chats on the stairs. I suppose you likes 
talking to 'er." 

"I like talking to everybody, Emma ; I like talking to 
you." 

" Yes, but not as you talks to 'er ; I 'ears you jes' do 
'ave fine times. She said this morning that she had not 
seen you for this last two nights — that you had forgotten 
'er, and I was to tell yer." 

" Very well, I'll come out to-night and speak to her." 

" And missus is so wild about it, and she daren't say 
nothing 'cause she thinks yer might go." 

* # ■* * # # 

A young man in a house full of women must be almost 
supernaturally unpleasant if he does not occupy a great 
deal of their attention. Certain at least it is that I was 
the point of interest in that house ; and I found there 
that the practice of virtue is not so disagreeable as many 
young men think it. The fat landlady hovered round 
my doors, and I obtained perfectly fresh eggs by merely 
keeping her at her distance; the pretty actress, with whom 
I used to sympathize on the stairs at midnight, loved me 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 23 

better, and our intimacy was more strange and subtle, be- 
cause it was pure, and it was not quite unpleasant to know 
that the awful servant dreamed of me as she might 
of a star, or something equally unattainable ; but the 
landlady's daughter, a nasty girl of fifteen, annoyed me 
with her ogling, which was a little revolting, but the rest 
was, and I speak quite candidly, not wholly unpleasant. 
It was not aristocratic, it is true, but, I repeat, it was not 
unpleasant, nor do I believe that any young man, how- 
ever refined, would have found it unpleasant. 

But if I was offered a choice between a chop and 
steak in the evening, in the morning I had to decide 
between eggs and bacon and bacon and eggs. A knock- 
ing at the door, " Nine o'clock, sir ; 'ot water, sir ; what 
will you have for breakfast ? " " What can I have ? " 
" Anything you like, sir. You can have bacon and eggs, 
or — " " Anything else ? " — Pause. — " Well, sir, you 
can have eggs and bacon, or—" " Well, I'll have eggs 
and bacon." 

The streets seemed to me like rat-holes, dark and 
wandering as chance directed, with just an occasional 
rift of sky, seen as if through an occasional crevice, so 
different from the boulevards widening out into bright 
space with fountains and clouds of green foliage. The 
modes of life were so essentially opposed. I am think- 
ing now of intellectual rather than physical comforts. I 
could put up with even lodging-house food, but I found 
it difficult to forego the glitter and artistic enthusiasm 
of the cafe. The tavern, I had heard of the tavern. 

Some seventy years ago the Club superseded the 
Tavern, and since then all literary intercourse has 
ceased in London. Literary dabs have been founded, 
and their leather arm-chairs have begotten Mr. Gosse ; 



124 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

but the tavern gave the world Villon and Marlowe. 
Nor is this to be wondered at. What is wanted is 
enthusiasm and devil-may-careism ; and the very aspect 
of a tavern is a snort of defiance at the hearth, the 
leather arm-chairs are so many salaams to it. I ask, 
Did any one ever see a gay club room ! Can any one 
imagine such a thing ? You can't have a club room 
without mahogany tables, you can't have mahogany 
tables without magazines — Longman's, with a serial by 
Rider Haggard, the Nineteenth Ce?itury i with an article, 
" The Rehabilitation of the Pimp in Modern Society," 
by W. E. Gladstone — a dulness that's a purge to good 
spirits, an aperient to enthusiasm ; in a word, a dulness 
that's worth a thousand a year. You can't have a club 
without a waiter in red plush and silver salver in his 
hand ; then you can't bring a lady to a club, and you 
have to get into a corner to talk about them. Therefore 
I say a club is dull. 

As the hearth and home grew all-powerful it became 
impossible for the husband to tell his wife that he was 
going to the tavern ; every one can go to the tavern, and 
no place in England where every one can go is con- 
sidered respectable. This is the genesis of the Club — 
out of the Housewife by Respectability. Nowadays 
every one is respectable — jockeys, betting-men, actors, 
and even actresses. Mrs. Kendal takes her children to 
visit a duchess, and has naughty chorus girls to tea, 
and tells them of the joy of respectability. There is 
only one class left that is not respectable, and that will 
succumb before long ; how the transformation will be 
effected I can't say, but I know an editor or two who 
wouid be glad of an article on the subject. 

Respectability ! — a suburban villa, a piano in the 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 25 

drawing-room, and going home to dinner. Such things 
are no doubt very excellent, but they do not promote 
intensity of feeling, fervor of mind ; and as art is in 
itself an outcry against the animality of human exis- 
tence, it would be well that the life of the artist should 
be a practical protest against the so-called decencies of 
life ; and he can best protest by frequenting a tavern 
and cutting his club. In the past the artist has always 
been an outcast ; it is only latterly he has become 
domesticated, and judging by results, it is clear that if 
Bohemianism is not a necessity it is at least an adjuvant. 
For if long locks and general dissoluteness were not an 
aid and a way to pure thought, why have they been so 
long his characteristics ? If lovers were not necessary 
for the development of poet, novelist, and actress, why 
have they always had lovers — Sappho, George Eliot, 
George Sand, Rachel, Sara ? Mrs. Kendal nurses 
children all day and strives to play Rosalind at night. 
What infatuation, what ridiculous endeavor ! To realize 
the beautiful woodland passion and the idea of the 
transformation, a woman must have sinned, for only 
through sin may we learn the charm of innocence. To 
play Rosalind a woman must have had more than one 
lover, and if she has been made to wait in the rain and 
has been beaten she will have done a great deal to 
qualify herself for the part. The ecstatic Sara makes 
no pretence to virtue, she introduces her son to an 
English duchess, and throws over a nation for the love 
of Richepein ; she can, therefore, say as none other : 

"Ce n'est plusqu'une ardeur dans mes veines cachee, 
C'est Venus tout entiere a sa proie attachee." 

Swinburne, when he dodged about London, a lively 



V- 



126 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

young dog, wrote " Poems and Ballads," and " Chaste- 
lard "; since he has gone to live at Putney, he has con- 
tributed to the Nineteenth Century, and published an 
interesting little volume entitled, " A Century of Ron- 
dels," in which he continues his plaint about his mother 
the sea. 

Respectability is sweeping the picturesque out of life ; 
national costumes are disappearing. The kilt is going 
or gone in the Highlands, and the smock in the South- 
lands, — even the Japanese are becoming Christian and 
respectable ; in another quarter of a century silk hats 
and pianos will be found in every house in Jeddo. Too 
true that universal uniformity is the future of the world ; 
and when Mr. Morris speaks of the democratic art to be 
when the world is socialistic, I ask, whence will the 
unfortunates draw their inspiration ? To-day our plight 
is pitiable enough — the duke, the jockey-boy, and the 
artist are exactly alike ; they are dressed by the same 
tailor, they dine at the same clubs, they swear the same 
oaths, they speak equally bad English, they love the 
same women. Such a state of things is dreary enough, 
but what unimaginable dreariness there will be when 
there are neither rich nor poor, when all have beeu 
educated, when self-education has ceased. A terrible 
world to dream of, worse, far worse, in darkness and 
hopelessness than Dante's lowest circle of hell. The 
spectre of famine, of the plague, of war, etc., are mild 
and gracious symbols compared with that menacing- 
figure, Universal Education, with which we are threat- 
ened, which has already eunuched the genius of the last 
five-and-twenty years of the nineteenth century, and 
produced a limitless abortion in that of future time. 
Edcation, I tremble before thy dreaded name. The 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 127 

cruelties of Nero, of Caligula, what were they ? — a few 
crunched limbs in the amphitheatre ; but thine, O 
Education, are the yearning of souls sick of life, of 
maddening discontent, or all the fearsome and fathom- 
less sufferings of the mind. When Geothe said " More 
light," he said the wickedest and most infamous words 
that human lips ever spoke. In old days, when a people 
became too highly civilized the barbarians came down 
from the north and regenerated that nation with dark- 
ness ; but now there are no more barbarians, and sooner 
or later I am convinced that we shall have to end the 
evil by summary edicts — the obstruction no doubt will 
be severe, the equivalents of Gladstone and Morley will 
stop at nothing to defeat the Bill ; but it will neverthe- 
less be carried by patriotic Conservative and Unionist 
majorities, and it will be written in the Statute Book 
that not more than one child in a hundred shall be 
taught to read, and no more than one in ten thousand 
shall learn the piano. 

Such will be the end of Respectability, but the end is 
still far distant. We are now in a period of decadence 
growing steadily more and more acute. The old gods 
are falling about us, there is little left to raise our hearts 
and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things 
only a snobbery is left to us, thank heaven, deeply 
graven in the English heart ; the snob is now the ark 
that floats triumphant over the democratic wave ; the 
faith of the old world reposes in his breast, and he shall 
proclaim it when the waters have subsided. 

In the mean while Respectability, having destroyed the 
Tavern, and created the Club, continues to exercise a 
meretricious and enervating influence on literature. All 
audacity of thought and expression has been stamped 



128 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

out, and the conventionalities are rigorously respected. 
It has been said a thousand times that an art is only a 
reflection of a certain age ; quite so, only certain ages 
are more interesting than others, and consequently pro- 
duce better art, jnst as certain seasons produce better 
crops. We heard in the Nouvelle Athenes how the Demo- 
cratic movement, in other words Respectability, in other 
words, Education, has extinguished the handicrafts ; 
it was admitted that in the more individual arts — paint- 
ing and poetry — men would be always found to sacrifice 
their lives for a picture or a poem : but no man is, after 
all, so immeasurably superior to the age he lives in as 
to be able to resist it wholly ; he must draw sustenance 
from some quarter, and the contemplation of the past 
will not suffice. Then the pressure on him from with- 
out is as water upon the diver ; and sooner or later he 
grows fatigued and comes to the surface to breathe ; he 
is as a flying-fish pursued by sharks below and cruel 
birds above ; and he neither dives as deeply nor flies as 
high as his freer and stronger ancestry. A daring spirit 
in the nineteenth century would have been but a timid 
nursery soul indeed in the sixteenth. We want tumult 
and war to give us forgetfulness, sublime moments of 
peace to enjoy a kiss in ; but we are expected to be 
home to dinner at seven, and to say and do nothing that 
might shock the neighbors. Respectability has wound 
itself about society, a sort of octopus, and nowhere are 
you quite free from one of its horrible suckers. The 
power of the villa residence is supreme : art, science, 
politics, religion, it has transformed to suit its require- 
ments. The villa goes to the Academy, the villa goes 
to the theatre, and therefore the art of to-day is mildly 
realistic ; not the great realism of idea, but the puny 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 29 

reality of materialism ; not the deep poetry of a Peter de 
Hogue, but the meanness of a Frith — not the winged 
realism of Balzac, but the degrading naturalism of a 
colored photograph. 

To my mind there is no sadder spectacle of artistic 
debauchery than a London theatre ; the overfed in- 
habitants of the villa in the stalls hoping for gross ex- 
citement to assist them through their hesitating diges- 
tions ; an ignorant mob in the pit and gallery forgetting 
the miseries of life in imbecile stories reeking of the sen- 
timentality of the back-stairs. Were other ages as 
coarse and as common as ours ? It is difficult to im- 
agine Elizabethan audiences as not more intelligent than 
those that applaud Mr. Pettit's plays. Impossible that 
an audience that could sit out Edward II. could find 
any pleasure in such sinks of literary infamies as In the 
Ranks and Harbor Lights. Artistic atrophy is benumb- 
ing us ; we are losing our finer feeling for beauty ; the 
rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the 
fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every 
drama is based, nor yet of the musty characters with 
which they are peopled — the miser in the old castle 
counting his gold by night, the dishevelled woman 
whom he keeps for ambiguous reasons confined in a 
cellar. Let all this be waived. We must not quarrel 
with the ingredients. The miser and the old castle are 
as true, and not one jot more true, than the million 
events which go to make up the phenomena of human 
existence. Not at these things considered separately 
do I take umbrage, but at the miserable use that is made 
of them, the vulgarity of the complications evolved from 
them, and the poverty of beauty in the dialogue. 

Not the thing itself, but the idea of the thing evokes 



130 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

the idea. Schopenhauer was right ; we do not want the 
thing, but the idea of the thing. The thing itself is 
worthless ; and the moral writers who embellish it with 
pious ornamentation are just as reprehensible as Zola, 
who embellishes it with erotic arabesques. You want 
the idea drawn out of obscuring matter ; this can best be 
done by the symbol. The symbol, or the thing itself, 
that is the great artistic question. In earlier ages it 
was the symbol ; a name, a plume, sufficed to evoke the 
idea ; now we evoke nothing, for we give everything ; 
the imagination of the spectator is no longer called into 
play. In Shakespeare's days, to create wealth in a 
theatre it was only necessary to write upon a board, 
"A magnificent apartment in a palace." This was no 
doubt primitive and not a little barbarous, but it was 
better by far than by dint of anxious archaeology to con- 
struct the Doge's palace upon the stage. By one rich 
pillar, by some projecting balustrade taken in conjunc- 
tion with a moored gondola, we should strive to evoke 
the soul of the city of Veronese ; by the magical and 
unequalled selection of a subtle and unexpected feature 
of a thought or aspect of a landscape, and not by the 
up-piling of an extraneous detail, are all great poetic 
effects achieved. 

" By the tideless dolorous inland sea, 
In a land of sand, of ruin, and gold." 

And, better example still, 

" Dieu que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois," 

that impeccable, that only line of real poetry Alfred de 
Vigny ever wrote ; and being a great poet Shakespeare 
consciously or unconsciously observed more faithfully 
than any other poet these principles of art ; and, as is 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 131 

characteristic of the present day, nowhere do we find 
these principles so grossly violated as in the representa- 
tion of his plays. I had painful proof of this some few 
nights after my arrival in London. I had never seen 
Shakespeare acted, and I went to the Lyceum and there 
I saw that exquisite love-song — for Romeo and Juliet is 
no more than a love-song in dialogue — tricked out in 
silks and carpets and illuminated building, a vulgar 
bawd suited to the gross passion of an ignorant public. 
I hated all that with the hatred of a passionate heart, 
and I longed for a simple stage, a few simple indi- 
cations, and the simple recitation of that story of the 
sacrifice of the two white souls for the reconciliation of 
two great families. My hatred did not reach to the age 
of the man who played the boy-lover, but to the offen- 
siveness with which he thrust his individuality upon me, 
longing to realize the poet's divine imagination : and 
the woman, too, I wished with my whole soul away, 
subtle and strange though she was, and I yearned for 
her part to be played by a youth as in old time : a youth 
cunningly disguised, would be a symbol ; and my mind 
would be free to imagine the divine Juliet of the poet, 
whereas I could but dream of the bright eyes and deli- 
cate mien and motion of the woman who had thrust her- 
self between me and it. 

But not with symbol and subtle suggestion has the 
villa to do, but with such stolid, intellectual fare as cor- 
responds to its material wants. The villa has not time 
to think, the villa is the working bee. The tavern is 
the drone. It has no boys to put to school, no neighbors 
to study, and is therefore a little more refined, or, should 
I say? depraved, in its taste. The villa in one form or 
other has always existed, and always will exist so long 



132 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

as our present social system holds together. It is the 
basis of life, and more important than the tavern. 
Agreed ; but that does not say that the tavern was not 
an excellent corrective influence to the villa, and that its 
disappearance has not had a vulgarizing effect on artis- 
tic work of all kinds, and the club has been proved im- 
potent to replace it, the club being no more than the 
correlative of the villa. Let the reader trace villa 
through each modern feature. I will pass on at once to 
the circulating library, at once the symbol and glory of 
villaism. 

The subject is not unfamiliar to me ; I come to it like 
the son to his father, like the bird to its nest. (Singular- 
ly inappropriate comparison, but I am in such excellent 
humor to-day ; humor is everything. It is said that 
the tiger will sometimes play with the lamb ! Let us 
play.) We have the villa well in our mind. The father 
who goes to the city in the morning, the grown-up girls 
waiting to be married, the big drawing-room where they 
play waltz music, and talk of dancing parties. But waltz- 
es will not entirely suffice, nor even tennis ; the girls 
must read. Mother cannot keep a censor (it is as much 
as she can do to keep a cook, housemaid, and page-boy), 
besides the expenses would be enormous, even if nothing 
but shilling and two-shilling novels were purchased. 
Out of such circumstances the circulating library was 
hatched. The villa made known its want, and art fell on 
its knees. Pressure was put on the publishers, and books 
were published at 31J. 6d. ; the dirty outside public was 
got rid of, and the villa paid its yearly subscription, and 
had nice, large, handsome books that none but the Mite 
could obtain, and with them a sense of being put on a 
footing of equality with my Lady This and Lady That, 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 133 

and certainty that nothing would come into the hands of 
dear Kate and Mary and Maggie that they might not 
read, and all for two guineas a year. English fiction be- 
came pure, and the garlic and assafcetida with which 
Byron, Fielding, and Ben Jonson so liberally seasoned 
their works, and in spite of which, as critics say, they 
were geniuses, have disappeared from our literature. 
English fiction became pure, dirty stories were to be 
heard no more, were no longer procurable. But at this 
point human nature intervened ; poor human nature ! 
when you pinch it in one place it bulges out in another, 
after the fashion of a lady's figure. Human nature has 
from the earliest time shown a liking for dirty stories ; 
dirty stories have formed a substantial part of every liter- 
ature (I employ the words " dirty stories " in the circu- 
lating library sense) ; therefore a taste for dirty stories 
may be said to be inherent in the human animal. Call 
it a disease if you will — an incurable disease — which, if 
it is driven jnwards, will break out in an unexpected 
quarter in a new form and with redoubled virulence. 
This is exactly what has happened. Actuated by the 
most laudable motives, Mudie cut off our rations of 
dirty stories, and for forty years we were apparently the 
most moral people on the face of the earth. It was con- 
fidently asserted that an English woman of sixty would 
not read what would bring the blush of shame to the 
cheeks of a maiden of any other nation. But humiliation 
and sorrow were awaiting Mudie. True it is that we 
still continued to subscribe to his library, true it is that 
we still continued to go to church, true it is that we 
turned our faces away when Mile, de Maupin or the Assom- 
moir was spoken of ; to"* all appearance we were as good 
and chaste as even Mudie might wish us ; and no doubt 



134 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

he looked back upon his forty years of effort with pride ; 
no doubt he beat his manly breast and said, " I have 
scorched the evil one out of the villa ; the head of the 
serpent is crushed for evermore "; but lo, suddenly, with 
all the horror of an earthquake, the slumbrous law courts 
awoke, and the burning cinders of fornication and the 
blinding and suffocating smoke of adultery were poured 
upon and hung over the land. Through the mighty col- 
umns of our newspapers the terrible lava rolled unceas- 
ing, and in the black stream the villa, with all its beauti- 
ful illusions, tumbled and disappeared. 

An awful and terrifying proof of the futility of human 
effort, that there is neither bad work nor good work to 
do, nothing but to await the coming of the Nirvana. 

I have written much against the circulating library, 
and I have read a feeble defence or two ; but I have not 
seen the argument that might be legitimately put for- 
ward in its favor. It seems to me this : the circulating 
library is conservatism, art is always conservative ; the 
circulating library lifts the writer out of the precarious- 
ness and noise of the wild street of popular fancy into a 
quiet place where passion is more restrained and there 
is more reflection. The young and unknown writer is 
placed at once in a place of comparative security, and 
he is not forced to employ vile and degrading methods 
of attracting attention ; the known writer, having a cer- 
tain market for his work, is enabled to think more of it 
and less of the immediate acclamation of the crowd ; but 
all these possible advantages are destroyed and rendered 
nil by the veracious censorship exercised by the librarian. 
****** 

There is one thing in England that is free, that is 
spontaneous, that reminds me of the blitheness and 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 135 

nationalness of the Continent ; — but there is nothing 
French about it, it is wholly and essentially English, and 
in its communal enjoyment and its spontaneity it is a 
survival of Elizabethan England — I mean the music-hall; 
the French music-hall seems to me silly, effete, sophis- 
ticated, and lacking, not in the popularity, but in the 
vulgarity of an English hall — I will not say the Pavilion, 
which is too cosmopolitan, dreary French comics are 
heard there — for preference let us say the Royal. I shall 
not easily forget my first evening there, when I saw for 
the time a living house — the dissolute paragraphists, the 
elegant mashers (mark the imaginativeness of the slang), 
the stolid, good-humored costers, the cheerful lights o' 
love, the extraordinary comics. What delightful unison 
of enjoyment, what unanimity of soul, what communality 
of wit ; all knew each other, all enjoyed each other's 
presence ; in a word, there was life. Then there were 
no cascades of real water, nor London docks, nor offen- 
sively rich furniture, with hotel lifts down which some 
one will certainly be thrown, but one scene representing 
a street ; a man comes on — not, mind you, in a real 
smock-frock, but in something that suggests one — and 
sings of how he came up to London, and was " cleaned 
out " by thieves. Simple, you will say ; yes, but better 
than a fricassee of Faust, garnished with hags, imps, and 
blue flame ; better, far better than a drawing-room set 
at the St. James's, with an exhibition of passion by Mrs. 
and Mr. Kendal ; better, a million times better than the 
cheap popularity of Wilson Barrett — an elderly man 
posturing in a low-necked dress to some poor slut in the 
gallery ; nor is there in the hall any affectation of lan- 
guage, nor that worn-out rhetoric which reminds you of a 
broken-winded barrel-organ playing Ah, che la morte, bad 



136 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

enough in prose, but when set up in blank verse awful 
and shocking in its more than natural deformity — but 
bright quips and cracks fresh from the back-yard of the 
slum where the linen is drying, or the " pub " where the 
unfortunate wife has just received a black eye that will 
last her a week. That inimitable artist, Bessie Bellwood, 
whose native wit is so curiously accentuated that it is 
no longer repellent vulgarity but art, choice and rare — 
see, here she comes with " What cheer, Rea ; Rea's on 
the job." The sketch is slight, but is welcome and 
refreshing after the eternal drawing-room and Mrs. 
Kendal's cumbrous domesticity ; it is curious, quaint, 
perverted, and are not these the awns and the attributes 
of art ? Now see that perfect comedian, Arthur Roberts, 
superior to Irving because he is working with living 
material ; how trim and saucy he is ! and how he evokes 
the soul, the brandy-and-soda soul, of the young men, 
delightful and elegant in black and white, who are so 
vociferously cheering him, " Will you stand me a cab- 
fare, ducky, I am feeling so awfully queer ? " The soul, 
the spirit, the entity of Piccadilly Circus is in the words, 
and the scene the comedian's eyes — each look is full of 
suggestion ; it is irritating, it is magnetic, it is symbolic, 
it is art. 

Not art, but a sign, a presentiment of an art, that may 
grow from the present seeds, that may rise into some 
stately and unpremeditated efflorescence, as the rhapsod- 
ist rose to Sophocles, as the miracle play rose through 
Peele and Nash to Marlowe, hence to the wondrous 
summer of Shakespeare, to die later on in the mist and 
yellow and brown of the autumn of Crowes and Dave- 
nants. I have seen music-hall sketches, comic interludes 
that in their unexpectedness and naive naturalness re- 






CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. I37 

mind me of the comic passages in Marlowe's Faustus j I 
waited (I admit in vain) for some beautiful phantom to 
appear, and to hear an enthusiastic worshipper cry out 
in his agony : 

' ' Was this the face that launched a thousand ships 
And burnt the topless towers of Illium ? 
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. 
Her lips suck forth my soul ; see where it flies ! 
Come, Helen, come ; give me my soul again. 
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips, 
And all is dross that is not Helena." 

And then the astonishing change of key : 

" I will be Paris, and for love of thee, 

Instead of Troy shall Wurtemberg be sacked," etc. 

The hall is at least a protest against the wearisome 
stories concerning wills, misers in old castles, lost heirs, 
and the woful solutions of such things — she who has 
been kept in the castle cellar for twenty years restored 
to the delights of hair-pins and a mauve dress, the in- 
genue to the protecting arm, etc. The music-hall is a 
protest against Mrs. Kendal's marital tendernesses and 
the abortive platitudes of Messrs. Pettit and Sims ; the 
music-hall is a protest against Sardou and the immense 
drawing-room sets, rich hangings, velvet sofas, etc., so 
different from the movement of the English comedy 
with its constant change of scene. The music-hall is a 
protest against the villa, the circulating library, the club, 
and for this the " 'all " is inexpressibly dear to me. 

But in the interests of those illiterate institutions 
called theatres it is not permissible for several characters 
to narrate events in which there is a sequel, by means of 
dialogue, in a music-hall. If this vexatious restriction 



138 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

were removed it is possible, if it is not certain, that while 
some halls remained faithful to comic songs and jugglers 
others would gradually learn to cater for more intellect- 
ual and subtle audiences, and that out of obscurity and 
disorder new dramatic forms, colored and permeated by 
the thought and feeling of to-day, might be definitely 
evolved. It is our only chance of again possessing a 
dramatic literature. 



CHAPTER X. 

IT is said that young men of genius come to London 
with great poems and dramas in their pockets and 
find every door closed against them. Chatterton s s 
death perpetuated this legend. But when I, Edward 
Dayne, came to London in search of literary adventure, 
I found a ready welcome. Possibly I should not have 
been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an 
ordinary person. Let this be waived. I was as covered 
with " fads " as a distinguished foreigner with stars. 
Naturalism I wore around my neck, Romanticism was 
pinned over the heart, Symbolism I carried like a 
toy revolver in my waistcoat pocket, to be used on 
an emergency. I do not judge whether I was 
charlatan or genius, I merely state that I found all — 
actors, managers, editors, publishers, docile and ready to 
listen to me. The world may be wicked, cruel, and 
stupid, but it is patient ; on this point I will not be gain- 
said, it is patient ; I know what I am talking about ; I 
maintain that the world is patient. If it were not, what 
would have happened ? I should have been murdered 
by the editors of (I will suppress names), torn in pieces 
by the sub-editors, and devoured by the office boys. 
There was no wild theory which I did not assail them 
with, there was no strange plan for the instant extermi- 
nation of the Philistine, which I did not press upon them, 
and (here I must whisper), with a fair amount of suc- 
cess; not complete success I am glad to say — that would 

139 



I40 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

have meant for the editors a change from their arm- 
chairs to the benches of the Union and the plank beds 
of Holloway. The actress, when she returned home 
from the theatre, suggested I had an enemy, a vindictive 
enemy, who dogged my steps ; but her stage experience 
led her astray. I had no enemy except nryself ; or to 
put it scientifically, no enemy except the logical conse- 
quences of my past life and education, and these caused 
me a great and real inconvenience. French wit was in 
my brain, French sentiment was in my heart ; of the 
English soul I knew nothing, and I could not remember 
old sympathies ; it was like seeking forgotten words ; and 
if I were writing a short story, I had to return in 
thought to Montmartre or the Champs Elysees for my 
characters. That I should have forgotten so much in 
ten years seems incredible, and it will be deemed impos- 
sible by many, but that is because few are aware of how 
little they know of the details of life, even of their own, 
and are incapable of appreciating the influence of their 
past upon their present. The visible world is visible 
only to a few ; the moral world is a closed book to nearly 
all. I was full of France, and France had to be got rid 
of, or pushed out of sight before I could understand 
England ; I was like a snake striving to slough its skin. 

Handicapped as I was with dangerous ideas, and an 
impossible style, defeat was inevitable. My English was 
rotten with French idiom ; it was like an ill-built wall 
overpowered by huge masses of ivy; the weak foundations 
had given way beneath the weight of the parasite ; and 
the ideas I sought to give expression to were green, sour, 
and immature as apples in August. 

Therefore before long the leading journal that had 
printed two poems and some seven or eight critical arti- 






CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 141 

cles, ceased to send me books for review, and I fell back 
upon obscure society papers. Fortunately it was not 
incumbent on me to live by my pen ; so I talked, and 
watched, and waited till I grew akin to those around me, 
and my thoughts blended with, and took root in my en- 
vironment. I wrote a play or two, I translated a French 
opera, which had a run of six nights, I dramatized a 
novel, I wrote short stories, and I read a good deal of 
contemporary fiction. 

The first book that came under my hand was " A Por- 
trait of a Lady," by Henry James. Each scene is devel- 
oped with complete foresight and certainty of touch. 
What Mr. James wants to do he does. I will admit that 
an artist may be great and limited ; by one word he may 
light up an abyss of soul ; but there must be this one 
magical and unique word. Shakespeare gives us the 
word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, 
gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous 
certainty ; but Henry James, no ; a hundred times he 
flutters about it ; his whole book is one long flutter near 
to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not 
spoken ; and for want of the word his characters are 
never resolved out of the haze of nebulae. You are on 
a bowing acquaintance with them ; they pass you in the 
street, they stop and speak to you, you know how they 
are dressed, you watch the color of their eyes. When I 
think of " A Portrait of a Lady," with its marvellous 
crowd of well-dressed people, it comes back to me pre- 
cisely as an accurate memory of a fashionable soiree — 
the staircase with its ascending figures, the hostess smil- 
ing, the host at a little distance with his back turned ; 
some one calls him. He turns ; I can see his white kid 
gloves ; the air is as sugar with the odor of the gardenias; 



142 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

there is brilliant light here ; there is shadow in the 
further rooms ; the women's feet pass to and fro beneath 
the stiff skirts ; I call for my hat and coat ; I light a 
cigar ; I stroll up Piccadilly. . . a very pleasant evening ; 
I have seen a good many people I knew ; I have observed 
an attitude, and an earnestness of manner that proved 
that a heart was beating. 

Mr. James might say, " If I have done this, I have 
done a great deal," and I would answer, " No doubt you 
are a man of great talent, great cultivation and not at all 
of the common herd ; I place you in the very front rank, 
not only of novelists but of men of letters." 

I have read nothing of Henry James's that did suggest 
the manner of a scholar ; but why should a scholar limit 
himself to empty and endless sentimentalities ? I will 
not taunt him with any of the old taunts — why does 
he not write complicated stories ? Why does he not 
complete his stories ? Let all this be waived. I 
will ask him only why he always avoids decisive 
action ? Why does a woman never say " I will " ? 
Why does a woman never leave the house with her 
lover ? Why does a man never kill a man ? Why 
does a man never kill himself ? Why is nothing ever 
accomplished ? In real life murder, adultery, and suicide 
are of common occurrence ; but Mr. James's people live 
in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition. 
Suicide or adultery has happened before the story be- 
gins, suicide or adultery happens some years hence, 
when the characters have left the stage, but bang in 
front of the reader nothing happens. The suppression 
or maintenance of story in a novel is a matter of per- 
sonal taste ; some prefer character-drawing to adven- 
tures, some adventures to character- drawing ; that you 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 143 

cannot have both at once I take to be a self-evident 
proposition ; so when Mr. Lang says, " I like adventures," 
I say, " Oh, do you ?" as I might to a man who says, "I 
like sherry"; and no doubt when I say I like character- 
drawing, Mr. Lang says, " Oh, do you ? " as he might to 
a man who says, " I like port." But Mr. James and I 
are agreed on essentials, we prefer character-drawing 
to adventures. One, two, or even three determining 
actions are not antagonistic to character-drawing ; the 
practice of Balzac, and Flaubert, and Thackeray prove 
that. Is Mr. James of the same mind as the poet Ver- 
laine — 

" La nuance, pas la couleur, 
Seulement la nuance, 
* * * * 

Tout le reste est litterature." 

In connection with Henry James I had often heard 
the name of W. D. Howells. I bought some three or 
four of his novels. I found them pretty, very pretty, 
but nothing more, — a sort of Ashby Sterry done into 
very neat prose. He is vulgar, is refined as Henry 
James ; he is more domestic ; girls with white dresses 
and virginal looks, languid mammas, mild witticisms, 
here, there, and everywhere ; a couple of young men, 
one a little cynical, the other a little overshadowed by 
his love ; a strong, bearded man of fifty in the back- 
ground ; in a word, a Tom Robertson comedy faintly 
spiced with American. Henry James went to France 
and read Tourgueneff. W. D. Howells stayed at home 
and read Henry James. Henry James's mind is of a 
higher cast and temper ; I have no doubt at one time of 
his life Henry James said, I will write the moral history 
of America, as Tourgueneff wrote the moral history of 



144 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

Russia — he borrowed at first hand, understanding what 
he was borrowing. W. D. Howells borrowed at second 
hand, and without understanding what he was borrow- 
ing. Altogether Mr. James's instincts are more schol- 
arly. Although his reserve irritates me, and I often re- 
gret his concessions to the prudery of the age, — no, not 
of the age but of librarians, — I cannot but feel that his 
concessions, for I suppose I must call them concessions, 
are to a certain extent self-imposed ; regretfully, perhaps, 
. . . somewhat in this fashion — '-' True, that I live in an 
age not very favorable to artistic production, but the art 
of an age is the spirit of that age ; if I violate the preju- 
dices of the age I shall miss its spirit, and an art that is 
not redolent of the spirit of its age is an artificial flower, 
perfumeless, or perfumed with the scent of flowers that 
bloomed three hundred years ago." Plausible, in- 
genious, quite in the spirit of Mr. James's mind ; I can 
almost hear him reason so ; nor does the argument dis- 
please me, for it is conceived in a scholarly spirit. Now 
my conception of W. D. Howells is quite different — I see 
him the happy father of a numerous family ; the sun is 
shining, the girls and boys are playing on the lawn, they 
jome trooping in to a high tea, and there is dancing in 
the evening. 

My fat landlady lent me a novel by George Meredith,- — 
" Tragic Comedians"; I was glad to receive it, for my 
admiration of his poetry, with which I was slightly ac- 
quainted, was very genuine indeed. " Love in a Valley " 
is a beautiful poem, and the " Nuptials of Attila," — I 
read it in the New Quarterly Review years ago — is very 
present in my mind, and it is a pleasure to recall its 
chanting rhythm, and lordly and sombre refrain — " Make 
the bed for Attila." I expected, therefore, one of my 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 145 

old passionate delights from his novels. I was disap- 
pointed, painfully disappointed. But before I say more 
concerning Mr. Meredith, I will admit at once frankly 
and fearlessly, that I am not a competent critic, because 
emotionally I do not understand him, and all except an 
emotional understanding is worthless in art. I do not 
make this admission because I am intimidated by the 
weight and height of the critical authority with which I 
am overshadowed, but from a certain sense, of which I 
am as distinctly conscious, viz., that the author is, how 
shall I put it? the French would say "quelqu'un"; that 
expresses what I would say in English. I remember, 
too, that although a man may be able to understand 
anything, that there must be some modes of thoughts 
and attitudes of mind which we are so naturally an- 
tagonistic to, so entirely out of sympathy with, that we 
are in no true sense critics of them. Such are the 
thoughts that come to me when I read Mr. George 
Meredith. I try to console myself with such reflections, 
and then I break forth, and crying passionately : — jerks, 
wire, splintered wood. In Balzac, which I know by 
heart ; in Shakespeare, which I have just begun to love, 
I find words deeply impregnated with the savor of 
life ; but in George Meredith there is nothing but crack- 
jaw sentences, empty and unpleasant in the mouth as 
sterile nuts. I could select hundreds of phrases which 
Mr. Meredith would probably call epigrams, and I would 
defy any one to say they were wise, graceful or witty. I 
do not know any book more tedious than " Tragic 
Comedians," more pretentious, more blatant ; it struts 
and screams, stupid in all its gaud and absurdity as a 
cockatoo. More than fifty pages I could not read. 
How, I asked myself, could the man who wrote the 



146 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

" Nuptials of Attila " write this ? but my soul returned 
no answer, and I listened as one in a hollow mountain 
side. My opinion of George Meredith never ceases to 
puzzle me. He is of the north, I am of the south. 
Carlyle, Mr. Robert Browning, and George Meredith 
are the three essentially northern writers ; in them there 
is nothing of Latin sensuality and subtlety. 

I took up " Rhoda Fleming." I found some exquisite 
bits of description in it, but I heartily wished them in 
verse, they were motives for poems ; and there was some 
wit. I remember a passage very racy indeed, of middle- 
class England. Antony, I think is the man's name, 
describes how he is interrupted at his tea ; a paragraph 
of seven or ten lines with " I am having my tea, I am at 
my tea," running through it for a refrain. Then a des- 
cription of a lodging-house dinner : " a block of bread 
on a lonely plate, and potatoes that looked as if they 
had committed suicide in their own steam." A little 
ponderous and stilted, but undoubtedly witty. I read 
on until I came to a young man who fell from his horse, 
or had been thrown from his horse, I never knew which, 
nor do I feel enough interest in the matter to make a 
research ; the young man was put to bed by his mother, 
and once in bed he began to talk ! . . . four, five, six, ten 
pages of talk, and such talk ! I can offer no opinion why 
Mr. George Meredith committed them to paper ; it is 
not narrative, it is not witty, nor is it sentimental, nor is 
it profound. I read it once ; my mind astonished at re- 
ceiving no sensation cried out like a child at a milkless 
breast. I read the pages again . . . did I understand ? 
Yes, I understood every sentence, but they conveyed no 
idea, they awoke no emotion in me ; it was like sand, 
arid and uncomfortable. The story is surprisingly com- 






CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 147 

monplace — the people in it are as lacking in subtlety as 
those of a Drury Lane melodrama. 

" Diana of the Crossways" I liked better, and had I* 
had absolutely nothing to do I might have read it to the 
end. I remember a scene with a rustic — a rustic who 
could eat hog a solid hour — that amused me. I re- 
member the sloppy road in the Weald, and the vague 
outlines of the South Downs seen in starlight and mist. 
But to come to the great question, the test by which 
Time will judge us all — the creation of a human being, 
of a live thing that we have met with in life before, and 
meet for the first time in print, and who abides with us 
ever after. Into what shadow has not Diana floated ? 
Where are the magical glimpses of the soul ? Do you 
remember in "Peres et Enfants," when Tourgueneff is 
unveiling the woman's, shall I say, affection, for Baza- 
roff, or the interest she feels in him ? and exposing at 
the same time the reasons why she will never marry him. 
... I wish I had the book by me, I have not seen it 
for ten years. 

After striving through many pages to put Lucien, 
whom you would have loved, whom I would have loved, 
that divine representation of all that is young and desir- 
ble in man, before the reader, Balzac puts these words in 
his mouth in reply to an impatient question by Vautrin, 
who asks him what he wants, what he is sighing for ; 
" L'etre ceVebre et d'etre aitne'" — these are soul-waking 
words, these are Shakespeare words. 

Where in " Diana of the Crossways " do we find soul- 
evoking words like these ? With tiresome repetition we 
are told that she is beautiful, divine ; but I see her not 
at all, I don't know if she is dark, tall, or fair ; with 
tiresome reiteration we are told that she is brilliant, that 



148 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

her conversation is like a display of fireworks, that the 
company is dazzled and overcome : but when she speaks 
the utterances are grotesque, and I say that if any one 
spoke to me in real life as she does in the novel, I should 
not doubt for an instant that I was in the company of a 
lunatic. The epigrams are never good, they never come 
within measurable distance of La Rochefoucauld, Balzac, 
or even Goncourt. The admirers of Mr. Meredith con- 
stantly deplore their existence, admitting that they des- 
troy all illusion of life. " When we have translated half 
of Mr. Meredith's utterances into possible human speech, 
then we can enjoy him," says the Pall Mall Gazette. 
We take our pleasures differently ; mine are spontane- 
ous, and I know nothing about translating the rank smell 
of a nettle into the fragrance of a rose, and then enjoy- 
ing it. 

Mr. Meredith's conception of life is crooked, ill-bal- 
anced, and out of tune. What remains ? — a certain 
lustiness. You have seen a big man with square shoul- 
ders and a small head, pushing about in a crowd ; he 
shouts and works his arms, he seems to be doing a great 
deal, — in reality he is doing nothing ; so Mr. Meredith 
appears to me, and yet I can only think of him as an 
artist ; his habit is not slatternly, like those of such 
literary hodmen as Mr. David Christie Murray, Mr. 
Besant, Mr. Buchanan. There is no trace of the crowd 
about him. I do not question his right of place, I am 
out of sympathy with him, that is all ; and I regret that 
it should be so, for he is one whose love of art is pure 
and untainted with commercialism, and if I may praise it 
for nought else, I can praise it for this. 

I have noticed that if I buy a book because I am ad- 
vised, or because I think I ought, my reading is sure to 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 149 

prove sterile. II faut que cela vient de moi } as a woman 
once said to me, speaking of her caprices ; a quotation, 
a chance word heard in an unexpected quarter. Mr. 
Hardy and Mr. Blackmore I read because I had heard 
that they were distinguished novelists ; neither touched 
me, I might just as well have bought a daily paper ; 
neither like nor dislike, a shrug of the shoulders — that 
is all. Hardy seems to me to bear about the same re- 
lation to George Eliot as Jules Breton does to Millet — 
a vulgarization never offensive, and executed with abil- 
ity. The story of an art is always the same, ... a suc- 
cession of abortive but ever strengthening efforts, a 
moment of supreme concentration, a succession of efforts 
weakening the final extinction. George Eliot gathered 
up all previous attempts, and created the English 
peasant ; and following her peasants there came an 
endless crowd from Devon, Yorkshire, and the Mid- 
land Counties, and, as they came, they faded into 
the palest shadows until at last they appeared in 
red stockings, high heels, and were lost in the chorus 
of opera. Mr. Hardy was the first step down. His 
work is what dramatic critics would call good, honest, 
straightforward work. It is unillumined by a ray of 
genius ; it is slow and somewhat sodden. It reminds me 
of an excellent family coach — one of the old sort hung 
on C springs — a fat coachman on the box and a footman 
whose livery was made for his predecessor. In criti- 
cising Mr. Meredith I was out of sympathy with my 
author, ill at ease, angry, puzzled ; but with Mr. Hardy 
I am on quite different terms, I am as familiar with him 
as with the old pair of trousers I put on when I sit down 
to write ; I know all about his aims, his methods ; I know 
what has been done in that line, and what can be done. 



I50 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

I have heard that Mr. Hardy is country bred, but I 
should not have discovered this from his writings. 
They read to me more like a report, yes, a report, — a 
conscientious, well-done report, executed by a thoroughly 
efficient writer sent down by one of the daily papers. 
Nowhere do I find selection, everything is reported, dia- 
logues and descriptions. Take for instance the long 
evening talk between the farm people when Oak is seek- 
ing employment. It is not the absolute and literal 
transcript from nature after the manner of Henri Mon- 
ier ; for that it is a little too diluted with Mr. Hardy's 
brains, the edges are a little sharpened and pointed ; I 
can see where the author has been at work filing ; on 
the other hand, it is not synthesized — the magical word 
which reveals the past, and through which we divine 
the future — is not seized and set triumphantly as it is 
in " Silas Marner." The descriptions do not 'flow out 
of and form part of the narrative, but are wedged in, 
and often awkwardly. We are invited to assist at a 
sheep-shearing scene, or at a harvest supper, because 
these scenes are not to be found in the works of George 
Eliot, because the reader is supposed to be interested in 
such things, because Mr. Hardy is anxious to show how 
jolly country he is. 

Collegians, when they attempt character-drawing, 
create monstrosities, but a practised writer should be 
able to create men and women capable of moving through 
a certain series of situations without shocking in any 
violent way the most generally applicable principles of 
common sense. I say that a practised writer should be 
able to do this ; that they sometimes do not is a matter 
which I will not now go into ; suffice it for my purpose 
if I admit that Mr. Hardy can do this. In Farmer Oak 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 15I 

there is nothing to object to ; the conception is logical, 
the execution is trustworthy ; he has legs, arms, and a 
heart ; but the vital spark that should make him of our 
flesh and of our soul is wanting ; it is dead water that 
the sunlight never touches. The heroine is still more 
dim ; she is stuffy, she is like tow ; the rich farmer is a 
figure out of any melodrama ; Sergeant Troy nearly 
quickens to life ; now and then the clouds are liques- 
cent, but a real ray of light never falls. 

The story-tellers are no doubt right when they insist 
on the difficulty of telling a story. A sequence of events 
—it does not matter how simple or how complicated — 
working up to a logical close, or, shall I say, a close in 
which there is a sense of rhythm and inevitableness, is 
always indicative of genius. Shakespeare affords some 
magnificent examples, likewise Balzac, likewise George 
Eliot, likewise Tourgueneff ; the " OEdipus " is, of course, 
the crowning and final achievement in the music of se- 
quence and the massy harmonies of fate. But in con- 
temporary English fiction I marvel, and I am repeatedly 
struck by the inability of writers, even of the first class, 
to make an organic whole of their stories. Here, I say, 
the course is clear, the way is obvious, but no sooner do 
we enter on the last chapters than the story begins to 
show incipient shiftiness, and soon it doubles back and 
turns, growing with every turn weaker like a hare before 
the hounds. From a certain directness of construction, 
from the simple means by which Oak's ruin is accom- 
plished in the opening chapters, I did not expect that 
the story would run hare-hearted in its close, but the 
moment Troy told his wife that he never cared for her, 
I suspected something was wrong ; when he went down 
to bathe and was carried out by the current I knew the 



I52 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

game was up, and was prepared for anything, even for 
the final shooting by the rich farmer, and the marriage 
with Oak, a conclusion which of course does not come 
within the range of literary criticism. 

" Lorna Doone " struck me as childishly garrulous, 
stupidly prolix, swollen with comments not interesting in 
themselves and leading to nothing. Mr. Hardy pos- 
sesses the power of being able to shape events ; he can 
mould them to a certain form ; that he cannot breathe 
into them the spirit of life I have already said, " but 
" Lorna Doone " reminds me of a third-rate Italian 
opera, La Fille du Regiment or Ernani ; it is corrupt 
with all the vices of the school, and it does not contain a 
single passage of real fervor or force to make us forget 
the inherent defects of the art of which it is a poor 
specimen. Wagner made the discovery, not a very 
wonderful one after all when we think, that an opera 
had much better be melody from end to end. The 
realistic school following on Wagner's footsteps dis- 
covered that a novel had much better be all narrative — 
an uninterrupted flow of narrative. Description is nar- 
rative, analysis of character is narrative, dialogue is 
narrative ; the form is ceaselessly changing, but the 
melody of narration is never interrupted. 

But the reading of " Lorna Doone " calls to my mind, 
and very vividly, an original artistic principle of which 
English romance writers are either strangely ignorant 
or neglectful, viz., that the sublimation of the dramatis 
persona and the deeds in which they are involved must 
correspond, and their relationship should remain unim- 
paired. Turner's " Carthage " is nature transposed and 
wonderfully modified. Some of the passages of light 
and shade there — those of the balustrade — are fugues, 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 153 

and there his art is allied to Bach in sonority and beauti- 
ful combination. Turner knew that a branch hung 
across the sun looked at separately was black, but he 
painted it light to maintain the equipoise of atmosphere. 
In the novel the characters are the voice, the deeds are 
the orchestra. But the English novelist takes 'Arry and 
'Arriet, and without question allows them to achieve 
deeds ; nor does he hesitate to pass them into the realms 
of the supernatural. Such violation of the first princi- 
ples of narration is never to be met with in the elder 
writers. Achilles stands as tall as Troy, Merlin is as 
old and as wise as the world. Rhythm and poetical 
expression are essential attributes of dramatic genius, 
but the original sign of race and mission is an instinc- 
tive modulation of man with the deeds he attempts or 
achieves. The man and the deed must be cognate and 
equal, and the melodic balance and blending are what 
first separate Homer and Hugo from the fabricators of 
singular adventures. In Scott leather jerkins, swords, 
horses, mountains, and castles harmonize completely and 
fully with food, fighting, words, and vision of life ; the 
chords are simple as Handel's, but they are as perfect. 
Lytton's work, although as vulgar as Verdi's, is, in much 
the same fashion, sustained by a natural sense of formal 
harmony ; but all that follows is decadent, — an admix- 
ture of romance and realism, the exaggerations of Hugo 
and the homeliness of Trollope ; a litter of ancient 
elements in a state of decomposition. 

The spiritual analysis of Balzac equals the triumphant 
imagination of Shakespeare, and by different roads they 
reach the same height of tragic awe ; but when improba- 
bility, which in these days does duty for imagination, is 
mixed with the familiar aspects of life, the result is in- 



154 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

choate and rhythmless folly: I mean the regular and in- 
evitable alternation and combination of pa and ma, and 
dear Annie who lives at Clapham, with the Mountains of 
the Moon, and the secret of eternal life ; this violation 
of the first principles of art — that is to say, of the rhythm 
of feeling and proportion, is not possible in France. I 
ask the reader to recall what was said on the subject of 
the Club, Tavern, and Villa. We have a surplus popu- 
lation of more than two million women ; the tradition 
that chastity is woman's only virtue still survives the 
Tavern and its adjunct Bohemianism have been sup- 
pressed, and the Villa is omnipotent and omnipresent ; 
tennis-playing, church on Sundays, and suburban hops 
engender a craving for excitement, for the far away, for 
the unknown ; but the Villa with its tennis-playing, 
church on Sundays, and suburban hops will not surren- 
der its own existence, it must take a part in the heroic 
deeds that happen in the Mountains of the Moon ; it 
will have heroism in its own pint pot. Achilles and 
Merlin must be replaced by Uncle Jim and an under- 
graduate ; and so the Villa is the author of " Rider Hag- 
gard," " Hugh Conway," " Robert Buchanan," and the 
author of " The House on the Marsh." 

I read two books by Mr. Christie Murray, " Joseph's 
Coat " and " Rainbow Gold," and one by Messrs. Besant 
and Rice, — " The Seamy Side." It is difficult to criti- 
cise such work ; there is absolutely nothing to say but 
that it is as suited to the mental needs of the Villa as the 
baker's loaves and the butcher's rounds of beef are to the 
physical. I do not think that any such literature is 
found in any other country. In France some three or 
four men produce works of art ; the rest of the fiction of 
the country is unknown to men of letters. But " Rain- 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 155 

bow Gold " — I take the best of the three — is not bad as a 
second-rate French novel is bad ; it is excellent as all 
that is straightforward is excellent ; and it is surprising 
to find that work can be so good, and at the same time so 
devoid of artistic charm. That such a thing should be 
is one of the miracles of the Villa. 

I have heard that Mr. Besant is an artist in the " Chap- 
lain of the Fleet " and other novels, but this is not possi- 
ble. The artist shows what he is going to do the moment 
he puts pen to paper, or brush to canvas ; he improves 
on his first attempts, that is all ; and I found " The Seamy 
Side " so very common, that I cannot believe for a mo- 
ment that its author or authors could write a line that 
would interest me. 

Mr. Robert Buchanan is a type of artist that every age 
produces unfailingly : Catulle Mendes is his counterpart 
in France, — but the pallid Portuguese Jew with his Christ- 
like face, and his fascinating fervor, is more interesting 
than the spectacled Scotchman. Both began with vol- 
umes of excellent but characterless verse, and loud out- 
cries about the dignity of art, and both have — well. 
. . . Mr. Robert Buchanan has collaborated with Gus 
Harris, and written the programme poetry for the Vaude- 
ville Theatre ; he has written a novel, the less said about 
which the better — he has attacked men whose shoe-strings 
he is not fit to tie, and having failed to injure them, he 
retracted all he said, and launched forth into slimy 
benedictions. He took Fielding's masterpiece, degraded 
it, and debased it ; he wrote to the papers the Fielding 
was a genius in spite of his coarseness, thereby inferring 
that he was a much greater genius since he had so- 
journed in this Scotch house of literary ill-fame. Clar- 
ville, the author of " Madame Angot," transformed 



156 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

Madame Marneff into a virtuous woman ; but he did 
not write to the papers to say that Balzac owed him a 
debt of gratitude on that account. 

The star of Miss Braddon has finally set in the obscure 
regions of servantgalism ; Ouida and Rhoda Broughton 
continue to rewrite the books they wrote ten years ago ; 
Mrs. Lynn Linton I have not read. The " Story of an 
African Farm " was pressed upon me. I found it sincere 
and youthful, disjointed but well-written ; descriptions of 
sand-hills and ostriches sandwiched with doubts con- 
cerning a future state, and convictions regarding the 
moral and physical superiority of women : but of art 
nothing ; that is to say, art as I understand it, — rhyth- 
mical sequence of events described with rhythmical se- 
quence of phrase. 

I read the " Story of Elizabeth " by Miss Thackeray. 
It came upon me with all the fresh and fair naturalness 
of a garden full of lilacs and blue sky, and I thought 
of Hardy, Blackmore, Murray, and Besant as of great 
warehouses where everything might be had, and even 
if the article required were not in stock it could be sup- 
plied in a few days at latest. The exquisite little de- 
scriptions, full of air, color, lightness, grace ; the French 
life seen with such sweet English eyes ; the sweet little 
descriptions all so gently evocative. " What a tranquil 
little kitchen it was, with a glimpse of the courtyard 
outside, and the cocks and hens, and the poplar 
trees waving in the sunshine, and the old woman 
sitting in her white cap busy at her homely work." 
Into many wearisome pages these simple lines have 
since been expanded, without affecting the beauty of 
the original. " Will Dampier turned his broad back and 
looked out of the window. There was a moment's 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNo MAN. 157 

silence. They could hear the tinkling of bells, the 
whistling of the sea, the voices of the men calling to each 
other in the port, the .sunshine streamed in ; Elly was 
standing in it, and seemed gilt with a golden background. 
She ought to have held a palm in her hand, poor little 
martyr ! " There is sweet wisdom in this book, wisdom 
that is eternal, being simple ; and near may not come 
the ugliness of positivism, nor the horror of pessimism, 
nor the profound grayness of Hegelism, but merely the 
genial love and reverence of a beautiful-minded woman. 
Such charms as these necessitate certain defects, I 
should say limitations. Vital creation,, of character is 
not possible to Miss Thackeray, but I do not rail against 
beautiful water-color indications of balconies, vases, 
gardens, fields, and harvesters because they have not the 
fervid glow and passionate force of Titian's Ariadne ; 
Miss Thackeray cannot give us a Maggie Tulliver, and 
all the many profound modulations of that Beethoven-like 
country-side : the pine wood and the cripple ; this aunt's 
linen-presses, and that one's economies ; the boy going 
forth to conquer the world, the girl remaining at home 
to conquer herself ; the mighty river holding the fate of 
all, playing and dallying with it for a while, and bearing 
it on at last to final and magnificent extinction. That 
sense of the inevitable which had the Greek dramatists 
wholly, which had George Eliot sufficiently, the rhyth- 
mical progression of events, rhythm and inevitableness 
(two words for one and the same thing), is not there. 
Elly's golden head, the background of austere French 
Protestants, is sketched with a flowing water-color brush, 
I do not know if it is true, but, true or false in reality, it 
is true in art. But the jarring dissonance of her mar- 
riage is inadmissible ; it cannot be led up to by chords 



158 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

no matter how ingenious ; the passage, the attempts from 
one key to the other, is impossible ; the true end is the 
ruin, by death or lingering life, of Elly, and the remorse 
of the mother. 

One of the few writers of fiction who seems to me to 
possess an ear for the- music of events is Miss Margaret 
Veley. Her first novel, " For Percival," although 
diffuse, although it occasionally flowed into by-channels 
and lingered in stagnating pools, was informed and held 
together, even at ends the most twisted and broken, by 
that sense of rhythmic progression which is so dear to 
me, and which was afterwards so splendidly developed 
in " Damocles." Pale, painted with gray and opaline 
tints of morning passes the grand figure of Rachel Con- 
way, a victim chosen for her beauty, and crowned with 
flowers of sacrifice. She has not forgotten the face of 
the maniac, and it comes back to her in its awful lines 
and lights when she finds herself rich and loved by the 
man whom she loves. The catastrophe is a double one. 
Now she knows she is accursed, and that her duty is to 
trample out her love. Unborn generations cry to her. 
The wrath and the lamentation of the chorus of the 
Greek singer, the intoning voices of the next-of-kin, the 
pathetic responses of voices far in the depths of ante- 
natal night, these the modern novelist, playing on an 
inferior instrument, may suggest, but cannot give ; but 
here the suggestion is so perfect that we cease to yearn 
for the real music, as, readiug from a score, we are 
satisfied with the flute and bassoons that play so fault- 
lessly in soundless dots. 

There is neither hesitation nor doubt. Rachel Conway 
puts her dreams away, she will henceforth walk in a sad 
and shady path ; her interests are centered in the child 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 159 

of the man she loves, and as she looks for the last time 
on the cloud of trees, glorious and waving green in the 
sunset that encircles her home, her sorrow swells once 
again to passion, and, we know, for the last time. 

The mechanical construction of M. Scribe I had learnt 
from M. Duval ; the naturalistic school had taught me 
to scorn tricks, and to rely on the action of the senti- 
ments rather than on extraneous aid for the bringing 
about of a denouement; and I thought of all this as I 
read " Disenchantment " by Miss Mabel Robinson, and 
it occurred to me that my knowledge would prove 
valuable when my turn came to write a novel, for the 
mise en place, the setting forth of this story, seemed to 
me so loose, that much of its strength had dribbled 
away before it had rightly begun. But the figure of the 
Irish politician I accept without reserve. It seems to 
me grand and mighty in its sorrowfulness. The tall, 
dark-eyed, beautiful Celt, attainted in blood and brain 
by generations of famine and drink, alternating with the 
fervid sensuousness of the girl, her Saxon sense of right 
alternating with the Celt's hereditary sense of revenge, 
his dreamy patriotism, his facile platitudes, his accept- 
ance of literature as a sort of bread-basket, his knowl- 
edge that he Is not great nor strong, and can do noth- 
ing in the world but love his country ; and as he passes 
his thirtieth year the waxing strong of the disease, 
nervous disease complex and torturous ; to him drink 
is at once life and death ; an article is bread, and to 
calm him and collect what remains of weak, scattered 
thought, he must drink. The woman cannot under- 
stand that caste and race, separate them ; and the damp 
air of spent desire, and the gray and failing leaves of 
her illusions fill her life's sky. Nor is there any hope 



l6o CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

for her until the husband unties the awful knot by 
suicide. 

I will state frankly that Mr. R. L. Stevenson never 
wrote a line that failed to delight me ; but he never 
wrote a book. You arrive at a strangely just estimate 
of a writer's worth by the mere question : " What is he 
the author of ? " for every writer whose work is destined 
to live is the author of one book that outshines the other, 
and, in popular imagination, epitomizes his talent and 
position. What is Shakespeare the author of ? What is 
Milton the author of? What is Fielding the author of? 
What is Byron the author of ? What is Carlyle the au- 
thor of ? What is Thackeray the author of ? What is 
Zola the author of ? What is Mr. Swinburne the author 
of? Mr. Stevenson is the author of, shall I say, " Treas- 
ure Island," or what? 

I think of Mr. Stevenson as a consumptive youth 
weaving garlands of sad flowers with pale, weak 
hands, or leaning to a large plate-glass window, and 
scratching thereon exquisite profiles with a diamond 
pencil. 

I do not care to speak of great ideas, for I am unable 
to see how an idea can exist, at all events can be great 
out of language ; an allusion to Mr. Stevenson's verbal 
expression will perhaps make my meaning clear. His 
periods are fresh and bright, rhythmical in sound, and 
perfect realizations of their sense ; in reading you often 
think that never before was such definiteness united to 
such poetry of expression ; every page and every sen- 
tence rings of its individuality. Mr. Stevenson's style is 
over-smart, well-dressed, shall I say, like a young man 
walking in the Burlington Arcade ? Yes, I will say so, 
but, I will add, the most gentlemanly young man that 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. l6l 

ever walked on the Burlington. Mr. Stevenson is com- 
petent to understand any thought that might be pre- 
sented to him, but if he were to use it, it would instantly 
become neat, sharp, ornamental, light, and graceful ; 
and it would lose all its original richness and harmony. 
It is not Mr. Stevenson's brain that prevents him from 
being a thinker, but his style. 

Another thing that strikes me in thinking of Steven- 
son (I pass over his direct indebtedness to Edgar Poe, 
and his constant appropriation of his methods) is the 
unsuitableness of the special characteristics of his talent 
to the age he lives in. He wastes in his limitations, and 
his talent is vented in prettiness of style. In speaking 
of Mr. Henry James, I said that, although he had con- 
ceded much to the foolish, false, and hypocritical taste 
of the time, the concessions he made had in little or 
nothing impaired his talent. The very opposite seems 
to me the case with Mr. Stevenson. For if any man liv- 
ing in this end of the century needed freedom of ex- 
pression for the distinct development of his genius, that 
man is R. L. Stevenson. He who runs may read, and 
he with any knowledge of literature will, before I have 
written the words, have imagined Mr. Stevenson writing 
in the age of Elizabeth or Anne. 

Turn your platitudes prettily, but write no word that 
could offend the chaste mind of the young girl who has 
spent her morning reading the Colin Campbell divorce 
case ; so says the age we live in. The penny paper that 
may be bought everywhere, that is allowed to lie on every 
table, prints seven or eight columns of filth, for no rea- 
sod except that the public likes to read filth ; the poet 
and novelist must emasculate and destroy their work 
because. . . . Who shall come forward and make an- 



l62 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

swer ? Oh, vile, filthy, and hypocritical century, I at 
least scorn you ! 

But this is not a course of literature but the story of 
the artistic development of me, Edward Dayne ; so I will 
tarry no longer with mere criticism, but go direct to the 
book to which I owe the last temple in my soul — " Ma- 
rius the Epicurean." Well I remember when I read the 
opening lines, and how they came upon me sweetly as 
the flowing breath of a bright spring. I knew I was 
awakened a fourth time, that a fourth vision of life was 
to be given to me. Shelley had revealed to me the un- 
imagined skies where the spirit sings of light and grace ; 
Gautier had shown me how extravagantly beautiful is 
the visible world and how divine is the rage of the flesh ; 
and with Balzac I had descended circle by circle into the 
nether world of the soul, and watched its afflictions. 
Then there were minor awakenings. Zola had en- 
chanted me with decoration and inebriated me with 
theory ; Flaubert had astonished with the wonderful 
delicacy and subtlety of his workmanship ; Goncourt's 
brilliant adjectival effects had captivated me for a time, 
but all these impulses were crumbling into dust, these 
aspirations were etiolated, sickly as faces grown old in 
gaslight. 

I had not thought of the simple and unaffected joy of 
the heart of natural things ; the color of the open air, 
the many forms of the country, the birds flying, — that 
one making for the sea ; the abandoned boat, the dwarf 
roses and the wild lavender ; nor had I thought of the 
beauty of mildness of life, and how by a certain avoid- 
ance of the wilfully passionate, and the surely ugly, we 
may secure an aspect of temporal life which is abiding 
and soul-sufficing. A new dawn was in my brain, fresh 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 163 

and fair, full of wide temples and studious hours, and 
the lurking fragrance of incense ; that such a vision of 
life was possible I had no suspicion, and it came upon 
me almost with the same strength, almost as intensely, 
as that divine song of the flesh, — Mademoiselle de 
Maupin. 

Certainly, in my mind, these books will be always inti- 
mately associated ; and when a few adventitious points 
of difference be forgotten, it is interesting to note how 
firm is the alliance, and how cognate and co-equal the 
sympathies on which it is based ; the same glad wor- 
ship of the visible world, and the same incurable belief 
that the beauty of material things is sufficient for all the 
needs of life. Mr. Pater can join hands with Gautier in 
saying—/^ trouve la terre aussi belle vue le ciel, et je pense 
que la correction de la forme est la vertu. And I too join 
issue ; I too love the great pagan world, its bloodshed, 
its slaves, its injustice, its loathing of all that is feeble. 

But " Marius the Epicurean " was more to me than a 
mere emotional influence, precious and rare though that 
may be, for this book was the first in English prose I 
had come across that procured for me any genuine 
pleasure in the language itself, in the combination of 
words for silver or gold chime, and unconventional 
cadence, and for all those lurking half-meanings, and 
that evanescent suggestion, like the odor of dead roses, 
that words retain to the last of other times and elder 
usage. Until I read " Marius " the English language 
(English prose) was to me what French must be to the 
majority of English readers. I read for the sense and 
that was all ; the language itself seemed to me coarse 
and plain, and awoke in me neither aesthetic emotion 
nor even interest. "Marius" was the steppbsg-stone 



164 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

that carried me across the channel into the genius of my 
own tongue. The translation was not too abrupt ; I 
found a constant and careful invocation of meaning that 
was a little aside of the common comprehension, and 
also a sweet depravity of ear for unexpected falls of 
phrase, and of eye for the less observed depths of colors, 
which although new was a sort of sequel to the educa- 
tion I had chosen, and a continuance of it in foreign but 
not wholly unfamiliar medium, and having saturated 
myself with Pater, the passage to De Quincey was easy. 
He, too, was a Latin in manner and in temper of mind ; 
but he was truly English, and through him I passed to 
the study of the Elizabethan dramatists, the real litera- 
ture of my race, and washed myself clean. 



CHAPTER XI. 

THOUGHTS IN A STRAND LODGING. 

AWFUL Emma has undressed and put the last child 
away — stowed the last child away in some myster- 
ious and unapproachable corner that none knows of but 
she ; the fat landlady has ceased to loiter about my 
door, has ceased to pester me with offers of brandy and 
water, tea and toast, the inducements that occur to her 
landlady's mind ; the actress from the Savoy has ceased 
to walk up and down the street with the young man who 
accompanied her home from the theatre ; she has ceased 
to linger on the doorstep talking to him ; her key has 
grated in the lock ; she has come upstairs ; we have had 
our usual midnight conversation on the landing ; she has 
told me her latest hopes of obtaining a part, and of the 
husband whom she was obliged to leave ; we have bid 
each other good-night ; she has gone up the creaky stair- 
case. I have returned to my room, littered with MS. 
and queer publications ; the night is hot and heavy, but 
now a wind is blowing from the river. I am listless and 
lonely — I open a book, the first book that comes to 
hand . . . it is Le Journal des Goncourts, p. 358, the 
end of a chapter : 

" It is really curious that it should be the four men the 
most free from all taint of handicraft and all base com- 
mercialism, the four pens the most entirely devoted to art y 
that were arraigned before the public prosecutor : Bauds* 
laire y Flaubert^ and ourselves." 

165 



l66 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

Yes, it is indeed curious, and I will not spoil the 
piquancy of the moral by a comment. No comment 
would help those to see who have eyes to see ; no 
comment would give sight to the hopelessly blind. 
Goncourt's statement is eloquent and suggestive 
enough ; I leave it a naked, simple truth ; but I 
would put by its side another naked, simple truth. 
This : If in England the public prosecutor does not 
seek to over-ride literature, the means of tyranny are 
not wanting, whether they be the tittle-tattle of the 
nursery or the lady's drawing-room, or the shameless 
combinations entered into by librarians ... In Eng- 
land as in France those who loved literature the most 
purely, who were the least mercenary in their love, 
were marked out for prosecution, and all three were 
driven into exile. Byron, Shelley, and George Moore ; 
and Swinburne, he, too, who loved literature for its own 
sake, was forced, amid cries of indignation and horror, 
to withdraw his book from the reach of the public that 
was rooting then amid the garbage of the Yelverton 
divorce case. I think of these facts and think of Baude- 
laire's prose poem — that poem in which he tells how a 
dog will run away howling if you hold to him a bottle 
of choice scent, but if you offer him some putrid morsel 
picked out of some gutter hole, he will sniff round it 
joyfully, and will seek to lick your hand for gratitude. 
Baudelaire compared that dog to the public. Baude- 
laire was wrong : that dog was a — . 



When I read Balzac's stories of Vautrin and Lucien 
de Rubempr£, I often think of Hadrian and the Anti- 
nous. I wonder if Balzac did dream of transposing the 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 167 

Roman Emperor and his favorite into modern life. It 
is the kind of thing that Balzac would think of. No 
critic has ever noticed this. 



Sometimes, at night, when all is still, and I look out 
on that desolate river, I think I shall go mad with grief, 
with wild regret for my beautiful appartement in Rue de 
la Tour des Dames. How different is the present to the 
past ! I hate with my whole soul this London lodging, 
and all that concerns it — Emma, and eggs and bacon, 
the fat lascivious landlady and her lascivious daughter ; 
I am sick of the sentimental actress who lives upstairs, 
I swear I will never go out to talk to her on the landing 
again. Then there is failure — I can do nothing, nothing ; 
my novel I know is worthless ; my life is a weak leaf ; it 
will flutter out of sight presently. I am sick of everything ; 
I wish I were back in Paris ; I am sick of reading ; I 
have nothing to read. Flaubert bores me. What non- 
sense has been talked about him ! Impersonal ! Non- 
sense, he is the most personal writer I know. That 
odious pessimism ! How sick I am of it ! It never ceases, 
it is lugged in a tout dropos, and the little lyrical phrase 
with which he winds up every paragraph, how boring it 
is. Happily, I have " A Rebours" to read, that prodig- 
ious book, that beautiful mosaic. Huysmans is quite 
right, ideas are well enough until you are twenty, after- 
wards only words are bearable ... a new idea, what 
can be more insipid — fit for members of parliament. . . . 
Shall I go to bed ? No. ... I wish I had a volume of 
Verlaine, or something of Mallarme's to read — Mal- 
larme" for preference. I remember Huysmans speaks of 
Mallarme in " A Rebours. " In hours like these a page 



l68 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a glass of some ex- 
quisite and powerful liqueur. 

" The decadence of a literature irreparably attacked 
in its organism, weakened by the age of ideas, overworn 
by the excess of syntax, sensible only of the curiosity 
which fevers sick people, but nevertheless hastening to 
explain everything in its decline, desirous of repairing 
all the omissions of its youth, to bequeath all the most 
subtle souvenirs of its suffering on its deathbed, is in- 
carnate in Mallarme in most consummate and absolute 
fashion. . . . 

" The poem in prose is the form, above all others, 
they prefer ; handled by an alchemist of genius, it should 
contain in a state of meat the entire strength of the 
novel, the long analysis and the superfluous description 
description of which it suppresses . . . the adjective 
placed in such an ingenious and definite way that it 
could not be legally dispossessed of its place, would 
open up such perspectives that the reader would dream 
for whole weeks together on its meaning at once precise 
and multiple ; affirm the present, reconstruct the past, 
divine the future of the souls of the characters revealed 
by the light of the unique epithet. The novel thus 
understood, thus condensed into one or two pages, 
would be a communion of thought between a magical 
writer and an ideal reader ; a spiritual collaboration by 
consent between ten superior persons scattered through 
the universe, a delectation offered to the most refined 
and accessible only to them." 

Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of 
Byzantine workmanship ; there is in his style the yearn- 
ing charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the 
mural, of the window. Ah ! in this hour of weariness 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 169 

for one of Mallarme's prose poems ! Stay, I remember 
I have some numbers of La Vogue. One of the numbers 
contains, I know, " Forgotten Pages "; I will translate 
word for word, preserving the very rhythm, one or two 
of these miniature marvels of diction: 

FORGOTTEN PAGES. 

" Since Maria left me to go to another star — which ? 
Orion, Altair, or thou, green Venus? I have always cher- 
ished solitude. What long days I have passed alone with 
my cat. By alone, I mean without a material being, and my 
cat is a mystical companion — a spirit. I can, therefore, 
say that I have passed whole days alone with my cat, and, 
alone with one of the last authors of the Latin decadence ; 
for since that white creature is no more, strangely and 
singularly I have loved all that the word fall expresses. 
In such wise that my favorite season of the year is the 
last weary days of summer, which immediately precede 
autumn, and the hour I choose to walk in is when the 
sun rests before disappearing, with rays of yellow copper 
<on the gray walls and red copper on the tiles. In the 
same way the literature that my soul demands — a sad 
voluptuousness — is the dying poetry of the last moments 
of Rome, but before it has breathed at all the rejuvenat- 
ing approach of the barbarians, or has begun to stam- 
mer the infantile Latin of the first Christian poetry. 

" I was reading, therefore, one of those dear poems 
(whose paint has more charm for me than the blush of 
youth), had plunged one hand into the fur of the pure 
animal, when a barrel organ sang languidly and melan- 
choly beneath my window. It played in the great alley 
of poplars, whose leaves appear to me yellow, even in the 
spring-tide, since Maria passed there with the tall candles 



170 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

for the last time. The instrument is the saddest, yes, 
truly ; the piano scintillates, the violin opens the torn 
soul to the light, but the barrel-organ, in the twilight of 
remembrance, made me dream despairingly. Now it 
murmurs an air joyously vulgar which awakens joy in 
the heart of the suburbs, — an air old-fashioned and com- 
monplace. Why do its flourishes go to my soul, and 
make me weep like a romantic ballad ? I listen, imbibing 
it slowly, and I do not throw a penny out of the window 
for fear of moving from my place, and seeing that the 
instrument is not singing itself. 

II. 

" The old Saxony clock, which is slow, and which 
strikes thirteen amid its flowers and gods, to whom did 
it belong ? Thinkest that it came from Saxony by the 
mail coaches of old time ? 

" (Singular shadows hang about the worn-out panes.) 

" And thy Venetian mirror, deep as a cold fountain in 
its banks of gilt work ; what is reflected there ? Ah ! 
I am sure that more than one woman bathed there in her 
beauty's sin ; and, perhaps, if I looked long enough, I 
should see a naked phantom. 

" Wicked one, thou often sayest wicked things. 

" (I see the spiders' webs above the lofty windows.) 

" Our wardrobe is very old ; see how the fire reddens 
its sad panels ! the weary curtains are as old, and the 
tapestry on the arm-chairs stripped of paint, and the old 
engravings, and all these old things. Does it not seem 
to thee that even these bluebirds are discolored by time ? 

" (Dream not of the spiders' webs that tremble above 
the lofty windows.) 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 171 

" Thou lovest all that, and that is why I live by thee. 
When one of my poems appeared, didst thou not desire, 
my sister, whose looks are full of yesterdays, the words, 
the grace of faded things ? New objects displease thee ; 
thee also do they frighten with their loud boldness, and 
thou feelest as if thou shouldest use them — a difficult 
thing indeed to do, for thou hast no taste for action. 

"Come, close thy old German almanac that thou 
readest with attention, though it appeared more than a 
hundred years ago, and the Kings it announces are all 
dead, and, lying on this antique carpet, my head leaned 
upon thy charitable knees, on the pale robe, oh ! calm 
child, I will speak with thee for hours; there are no 
fields, and the streets are empty, I will speak to thee of 
our furniture. 

" Thou art abstracted ? 

" (The spiders' webs are shivering above the lofty 
windows.)" 

To argue about these forgotten pages would be futile. 
We, the " ten superior persons scattered through the 
universe," think these prose poems the concrete essence, 
the osmazomeof literature, the essential oil of art ; others, 
those in the stalls, will judge them to be the aberrations 
of a refined mind, distorted with hatred of the common- 
place ; the pit will immediately declare them to be non- 
sense, and will return with satisfaction to the last leading 
article in the daily paper. 



" J* at fait mes adieux a ma mere et je viens pour vous 
faire les miens" and other absurdities by Ponson du Ter- 
rail amused us many a year in France, and in later days 



172 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

similar bad grammar by Georges Ohnet has not been 
lost upon us, but neither Ponson du Terrail nor Georges 
Ohnet sought literary suffrage ; such a thing could not 
be in France ; but in England, Rider Haggard, whose 
literary atrocities are more atrocious than his accounts 
of slaughter, receives the attention of leading journals 
and writes about the revival of Romance. As it is as 
difficult to write the worst as the best conceivable sen- 
tence, I take this one and place it for its greater glory in 
my less remarkable prose: 

" As we gazed on the beauties thus revealed by Good, a 
spirit of emulation filled our breasts, and we set to work to 
get ourselves up as well as we could." 

A return to romance ! a return to the animal, say I. 



One thing that cannot be denied to the realists : a con- 
stant and intense desire to write well, to write artistically. 
When I think of what they have done in the matter of 
the use of words, of the myriad verbal effects they have 
discovered, of the thousand forms of composition they 
have created, how they have remodelled and refashioned 
the language in their untiring striving for intensity of 
expression for the very osmazome of art, I am lost in 
ultimate wonder and admiration. What Hugo did for 
French verse, Flaubert, Goncourt, Zola, and Huysmans 
have done for French prose. No more literary school 
than the realists has ever existed, and I do not except 
even the Elizabethans. And for this our failures are 
more interesting than the vulgar successes of our oppo- 
nents ; for when we fall into the sterile and distorted, it 
is through our noble and incurable hatred of the com- 
monplace, of all that is popular. 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 73 

The healthy school is played out in England ; all 
that could be said has been said ; the successors of 
Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot have no ideal, 
and consequently no language ; what can be more pud- 
ding than the language of Mr. Hardy, and he is typical 
of a dozen other writers, Mr. Besant, Mr. Murray, Mr. 
Crawford ? The reason of this heaviness of thought 
and expression is that the avenues are closed, no new 
subject-matter is introduced ; the language of English 
fiction has therefore run stagnant. But if the realists 
should catch favor in England the English tongue may 
be saved from dissolution, for with the new subjects 
they would introduce, new forms of language would 
arise. 



I wonder why murder is considered less immoral than 
fornication in literature ? 



I feel that it is almost impossible for the same ear to 
seize music so widely differing as Milton's blank verse 
and Hugo's alexandrines, and it seems to me especially 
strange that critics varying in degree from Matthew 
Arnold to the obscure paragraphist, never seem even 
remotely to suspect, when they passionately declare that 
English blank verse is a more perfect and complete 
poetic instrument than French alexandrines, that the 
imperfections which they aver are inherent in the latter 
exist only in their British ears, impervious to a thousand 
subtleties. Mr. Matthew Arnold does not hesitate to 
say that the regular rhyming of the lines is monotonous. 
To my ear every line is different ; there is as much vari- 
ation in Charles V.'s soliloquy as in Hamlet's ; but be 



174 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

this as it may, it is not unworthy of the inmates of Han- 
well for critics to inveigh against la rimepleine, that 
which is instinctive in the language as accent in ours, 
that which is the very genius of the language. 

But the principle has been exaggerated, deformed, 
caricatured until some of the most modern verse is little 
more than a series of puns — in art as in life the charm 
lies in the unexpected, and it is annoying to know that 
the only thought of every poet is to couple les murs with 
des fruits trop mdrs, and that no break in the absolute 
richness of sound is to be hoped for. Gustave Kahn, 
whose beautiful volume " Les Palais Nomades " I have 
read with the keenest delight, was the first to recognize 
that an unfailing use of la rime pleine might become 
cloying and sat ating, and that, by avoiding it some- 
times and markedly and maliciously choosing in prefer- 
ence a simple assonance, new and subtle music might 
be produced. 

" Les Palais Nomades " is a really beautiful book, 
and it is free from all the faults that make an absolute 
and supreme enjoyment of great poetry an impossibil- 
ity. For it is in the first place free from those pests 
and parasites of artistic work — ideas. Of all literary 
qualities the creation of ideas is the most fugitive. 
Think of the fate of an author who puts forward a new 
idea to-morrow in a book, in a play, in a poem. The 
new idea is seized upon, it becomes a common property, 
it is dragged through newspaper articles, magazine ar- 
ticles, through books, it is repeated in clubs, drawing- 
rooms ; it is bandied about the corners of streets ; in a 
week it is wearisome ; in a month it is an abomination. 
Who has not felt a sickening feeling come over him 
when he hears such phrases as " To be or not to be, 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 75 

that is the question " ? Shakespeare was really great 
when he wrote " Music to hear, why nearest thou music 
sadly ? " not when he wrote, " The apparel oft proclaims 
the man." Could he be freed from his ideas what a 
poet we should have ! Therefore, let those who have 
taken firsts at Oxford devote their intolerable leisure to 
preparing an edition from which everything resembling 
an idea shall be firmly excluded. We might then shut 
up our Marlowes and our Beaumonts and resume our 
reading of the bard, and these witless beings would con- 
fer happiness on many, and crown themselves with truly 
immortal bays. See the fellows ! their fingers catch at 
scanty wisps of hair ; the lamps are burning ; the long 
pens are poised, and idea after idea is hurled out of 
existence. 

Gustave Kahn took counsel of the past, and he has 
successfully avoided everything that even a hostile critic 
might be tempted to term an idea ; for this I am grate- 
ful to him. Nor is his volume a collection of miscella- 
neous verses bound together. He has chosen a certain 
sequence of emotions ; the circumstances out of which 
these emotions have sprung are given in a short prose 
note. " Les Palais Nomades " is therefore a novel in 
essence ; description and analysis are eliminated, and 
only the moments when life grows lyrical with suffering 
are recorded ; recorded in many varying metres con- 
forming only to the play of the emotion ; for, unlike 
many who, having once discovered a tune, apply it 
promiscuously to every subject they treat, Kahn adapts 
his melody to the emotion he is giving expression to, 
with the same propriety and grace as Nature distributes 
perfume to her flowers. For an example of magical 
transition of tone I turn to Intermede. 



176 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

"Chere apparence viens aux cou chants illumines 
Veux tu mieux des matins albes et calmes 
Les soirs et les matins ont des calmes rosatres 
Les eaux ont des manteaux de cristal irise 

Et des rythmes de calmes palmes 
Et l'air evoque de calmes musique de patres. 



Viens sous des tendelets aux fleuves souriants 
Aux lilas palis des nuits d'Orient 

Aux glauques etendues a falbalas d'argent 
A l'oasis des baisers urgents 

Seulement vit le voile aux seuls Orients. 



Quel que soit le spectacle et quelle que soit la rame 
Et quelle que soit la voix qui s'affame et brame, 
L'oublie du lointain des jours chatouille et serre, 
Le lotos de l'oubli s'est fane dans mes serres, 
Cependant tu m'aimais a jamais ? 
Adieu pour jamais." 

The repetitions of Edgar Poe seem hard and mechi- 
cal after this, so exquisite and evanescent is the rhythm, 
and the intonations come as sweetly and suddenly as a 
gust of perfume ; it is as the vibration of a fairy orches- 
tra, flute and violin disappearing in a silver mist ; but 
the clouds break, and all the enchantment of a spring 
garden appears in a shaft of sudden sunlight. 

' ' L'ephemere idole, au frisson du printemps, 
Sentant des renouveaux eclore, 
Le guepa de satins si lointains et d'antan ; 
Rose exiles des flores ! 

*' Le jardin rima ses branches de lilas; 
Aux murs, les roses tremieres ; 
La terre etala, pour feter les las, 
Des divans vert lumiere ; 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 177 

" Des rires ailes peuplerent le jardin ; 
Souriants des caresses breves, 
Des oiseaux joyeux, jaunes, incarnadins 
Vibrerent aux ciels de reve." 

But to the devil with literature, I am sick of it ; who 
the deuce cares if Gustave Kahn writes well or badly. 
Yesterday I met a chappie whose views of life coincide 
with mine. " A ripping good dinner," he says ; " get a 
skinful of champagne inside you, go to bed when it is 
light, and get up when you are rested." This seems to 
me as concise as it is admirable ; indeed there is little 
to add to it ... a note or two concerning women might 
come in — but I don't know, " a skinful of champagne " 
implies everything. 

Each century has its special ideal ; the ideal of the 
nineteenth is a young man. The seventeenth century is 
only woman — see the tapestries, the delightful goddesses 
who have discarded their hoops and heels to appear in 
still more delightful nakedness, the noble woods, the tall 
castles, with the hunters looking around ; no servile 
archaeology chills the fancy, it is but a delightful whim ; 
and this treatment of antiquity is the highest proof of 
the genius of the seventeenth century. See the Frago- 
nards — the ladies in high-peaked bodices, their little 
ankles showing amid the snow of the petticoats. Up 
they go ; you can almost hear their light false voices 
into the summer of the leaves, where Loves are garlanded 
even as of roses. Masks and arrows are everywhere, all 
the machinery of light and gracious days. In the Wat- 
teaus the note is more pensive ; there is satin and sun- 
set, plausive gestures and reluctance — false reluctance ; 
the guitar is tinkling, and exquisite are the notes in the 
languid evening ; and there is the Pierrot, that marvel- 



I78 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

lous white animal, sensual and witty and glad, the soul 
of the century — ankles and epigrams everywhere, for 
love was not then sentimental, it was false and a little 
cruel ; see the furniture and the polished floor, and the 
tapestries with whose delicate tints and decorations the 
high hair blends, the footstool and the heel and the calf 
of the leg that is withdrawn, showing in the shadows of 
the lace ; look at the satin of the bodices, the fan out- 
spread, the wigs so adorably false, the knee-breeches, 
the buckles on the shoes, how false ; adorable little 
comedy, adorably mendacious ; and how sweet it is to 
feast on these sweet lies, it is a divine delight to us, 
wearied with the hideous sincerity of newspapers. Then 
it was the man who knelt at the woman's feet, it was the 
man who pleaded and the woman who acceded ; but in 
our century the place of the man is changed, it is he who 
hold the fan, it is he who is besought ; and if one were 
to dream of continuing the tradition of Watteau and 
Fragonard in the nineteenth century, he would have to 
take note of and meditate deeply and profoundly on this, 
as he sought to formulate and synthesize the erotic spirit 
of our age. 

The position of a young man in the nineteenth cen- 
tury is the most enviable that has ever fallen to the lot 
of any human creature. He is the rare bird, and is 
feted, flattered, adored. The sweetest words are ad- 
dressed to him, the most loving looks are poured upon 
him. The young man can do no wrong. Every house 
is open to him ; girls dispute the right to serve him ; 
they come to him with cake and wine, they sit circlewise 
and listen to him, and when one is fortunate to get him 
alone she will hang round his neck, she will propose to 
him, and will take his refusal kindly and without resent- 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 79 

ment. They will not let him stoop to tie up his shoe 
lace, but will rush and simultaneously claim the right to 
attend on him. To represent in a novel a girl proposing 
marriage to a man would be deemed unnatural, but 
nothing is more common ; there are few young men who 
have not received at least a dozen offers, nay, more ; it 
is characteristic, it has become instinctive for girls to 
choose, and they prefer men not to make love to them ; and 
every young man who knows his business avoids making 
advances, knowing well that it will only put the girl off. 
In a society so constituted, what a delightful opening 
there is for a young man! He would have to waltz per- 
fectly, play tennis fairly, the latest novel would suffice 
for literary attainments ; billiards, shooting, and hunt- 
ing, would not come in amiss, for he must not be 
considered a useless being by men ; not that women 
are much influenced by the opinion of men in 
their choice of favorites, but the reflex action of the 
heart, although not so marked as that of the stomach, 
exists and must be kept in view ; besides a man who 
would succeed with women must succeed with men, — 
the real Lovelace is loved by all. Like gravitation, love 
draws all things. Our young man would have to be five 
feet eleven, or six feet, broad shoulders, light brown 
hair, deep eyes, soft and suggestive, broad shoulders, 
a thin neck, long delicate hands, a high instep. His 
nose should be straight, his face oval and small, he must 
be clean about the hips, and his movements must be 
naturally caressing. He comes into the ball-room, his 
shoulders well back, he stretches his hand to the hostess, 
he looks at her earnestly (it is characteristic of him to 
think of the hostess first ; he is in her house, the house is 
well furnished, and is suggestive of excellent meats and 
wines). He can read through the slim woman whose 



l8o CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

black hair, a-glitter with diamonds, contrasts with her 
white satin ; an old man is talking to her, she dances 
with him, and she refused a young man a moment before. 
This is a bad sign ; our Lovelace knows it ; there is a 
stout woman of thirty-five, who is looking at him, red 
satin bodice, doubtful taste. He looks away ; a little 
blonde woman fixes her eyes on him, she looks as inno- 
cent as a child ; instinctively our Lovelace turns to his 
host. " Who is that little blonde woman over there, the 

right-hand corner ? " he asks. " Ah, that is Lady ." 

" Will you introduce me ? " " Certainly." Lovelace has 
made up his mind. Then there is a young oldish girl, 
richly dressed ; " I hear her people have a nice house in 
a hunting country, I will dance with her, and take the 
mother into supper, and, if I can get a moment, will have 
a pleasant talk with the father in the evening." 

In manner Lovelace is facile and easy ; he never says 
no, it is always yes, ask him what you will ; but he only 
does what he has made up his mind it is his advantage 
to do. Apparently he is an embodiment of all that is 
unselfish, for he knows that after he has helped himself, 
it is advisable to help some one else, and thereby make 
a friend who, on a future occasion, will be useful to him. 
Put a violinist into a room filled with violins, and he will 
try every one. Lovelace will put each woman aside so 
quietly that she is often only half aware that she has been 
put aside. Her life is broken ; she is content that it 
should be broken. The real genius for love lies not in 
getting into, but getting out of love. 



I have noticed that there are times when every second 
woman likes you. Is love, then, a magnetism which we 
sometimes possess and exercise unconsciously, and some- 
times do not possess ? 



CHAPTER XII. 

AND now, hypocritical reader, I will answer the ques- 
tions which have been agitating you this long while, 
which you have asked at every stage of this long narra- 
tive of a sinful life. Shake not your head, lift not your 
finger, exquisitely hypocritical reader ; you can deceive 
me in nothing. I know the baseness and nnworthiness 
of your soul as I know the baseness and unworthiness of 
my own. This is a magical tete-ti-tete, such a one as will 
never happen in your life again ; therefore I say let us 
put off all customary disguise, let us be frank : you have 
been angrily asking, exquisitely hypocritical reader, why 
you have been forced to read this record of sinful life ; 
in your exquisite hypocrisy, you have said over and over 
again what good purpose can it serve for a man to tell 
us of his unworthiness unless, indeed, it is to show us 
how he may rise, as if on stepping-stones of his dead 
self, to higher things, etc. You sighed, O hypocritical 
friend, and you threw the magazine on the wicker table, 
where such things lie, and you murmured something 
about leaving the world a little better than you found it, 
and you went down to dinner and lost consciousness of 
the world in the animal enjoyment of your stomach. I 
hold out my hand to you, I embrace you, you are my 
brother, and I say, undeceive yourself, you will leave the 
world no better than you found it. The pig that is being 
slaughtered as I write this line will leave the world better 
than it found it, but you will leave only a putrid carcase 

181 



182 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

fit for nothing but the grave. Look back upon your life, 
examine it, probe it, weigh it, philosophize on it, and then 
say, if you dare, that it has not been a very futile and 
foolish affair. Soldier, robber, priest, atheist, courtesan, 
virgin, I care not what you are, if you have not brought 
children into the world to suffer your life has been as 
vain and as harmless as mine has been. I hold out my 
hand to you, we are brothers ; but in my heart of hearts 
I think myself a cut above you, because I do not believe 
in leaving the world better than I found it ; and you, 
exquisitely hypocritical reader, think that you are a cut 
above me because you say you would leave the world 
better than you found it. The one eternal and immut- 
able delight of life is to think, for one reason or another, 
that we are better than our neighbors. This is why I 
wrote this book, and this is why it is affording you so 
much pleasure, O exquisitely hypocritical reader, my 
friend, my brother, because it helps you to the belief that 
you are not so bad after all. Now to resume. 

The knell of my thirtieth year has sounded ; in three 
or four years my youth will be as a faint haze on the sea, 
an illusive recollection ; so now, while standing on the 
last verge of the hill, I will look back on the valley I 
lingered in. Do I regret ? I neither repent nor do I 
regret ; and a fool and a weakling I should be if I did. 
I know the worth and the rarity of more than fifteen 
years of systematic enjoyment. Nature provided me 
with as perfect a digestive apparatus, mental and physi- 
cal, as she ever turned out of her workshop ; my stomach 
and brain are set in the most perfect equipoise possible 
to conceive, and up and down they went and still go 
with measured movement, absorbing and assimilating all 
that is poured into them without friction or stoppage. 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 183 

This book is a record of my mental digestions ; but it 
would take another series of confessions to tell of the 
dinners I have eaten, the champagne I have drunk ! and 
the suppers ! seven dozen of oysters, pat£-de-foie-gras, 
heaps of truffles, salad, and then a walk home in the 
early morning, a few philosophical reflections sug- 
gested by the appearance of a belated street-sweeper, 
then sleep, quiet and gentle sleep. 

I have had the rarest and most delightful friends. 
Ah, how I have loved my friends ; the rarest wits of my 
generation were my boon companions ; everything con- 
spired to enable me to gratify my body and my brain ; 
and do you think this would have been so if I had been 
a good man ? If you do you are a fool ; good intentions 
and bald greed go to the wall, but subtle selfishness with 
a dash of unscrupulousness pulls more plums out of life's 
pie than the seven deadly virtues. If you are a good 
man you want a bad one to convert ; if you are a bad 
man you want a bad one to go out on the spree with. 
And you, my dear, my exquisite reader, place your hand 
upon your heart, tell the truth, remember this is a magi- 
cal Ute-ct-tite which will happen never again in your life, 
admit that you feel just a little interested in my wicked- 
ness, admit that if you ever thought you would like to' 
know me it is because I know a great deal that you 
probably don't ; admit that your mouth waters when you 
think of rich and various pleasures that fell to my share 
in happy, delightful Paris ; admit that if this book had 
been an account of the pious books I had read, the 
churches I had been to, and the good works I had done, 
that you would not have bought it or borrowed it. Hypo- 
critical reader, think, had you had courage, health, and 
money to lead a fast life, would you not have done so ? 



184 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAJXT, 

You don't know, no more do I ; I have done so, and I 
regret nothing except that some infernal farmers and 
miners will not pay me what they owe me and enable me 
to continue the life that was once mine, and of which I 
was so bright an ornament. How I hate this atrocious 
Strand lodging-house, how I long for my apartment in 
Rue de la Tour des Dames, with all its charming ad- 
juncts, palms and pastels, my cat, my python, my friends, 
blond hair and dark. 

It was not long before I wearied of journalism ; the 
daily article soon grows monotonous, even when you 
know it will be printed, and this I did not know ; my 
prose was very faulty, and my ideas were unsettled, I 
could not go to the tap and draw them off, the liquor was 
still fermenting ; and partly because my articles were not 
very easily disposed of, and partly because I was weary 
of writing on different subjects, I turned my attention to 
short stories. I wrote a dozen with a view to preparing 
myself for a long novel. Some were printed in weekly 
newspapers, others were returned to me from the maga- 
zines. But there was a publisher in the neighbourhood 
the Strand, who used to frequent a certain bar. I saw 
the chance, and I seized it. This worthy man conducted 
his business as he dressed himself, sloppily ; a dear kind 
soul, quite witless and quite ^-less. From long habit he 
would make a feeble attempt to drive a bargain, but he 
generally let himself in : he was, in a word, a literary 
stepping-stone. Hundreds had made use of him. If a 
fashionable author asked for two hundred pounds for a 
book out of which he would be certain to make three, it 
was ten to one that he would allow the chance to drift 
away from him ; but after having refused a dozen times 
the work of a Strand loafer whom he was in the habit of 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 85 

" treating," he would say, " Send it in, my boy, send it 
in, I'll see what can be done with it." There was a long 
counter, and the way to be published by Mr. B. was to 
straddle on the counter and play with a black cat. There 
was an Irishman behind this counter who, for three 
pounds a week, edited the magazine, read the MS., 
looked after the printer and binder, kept the accounts 
when he had a spare moment, and entertained the visi- 
tors. I did not trouble Messrs. Macmillan and Messrs. 
Longman with polite requests to look at my MS., but 
straddled on the counter, played with the cat, joked with 
the Irishman, was treated by Mr. B., and in the natural 
order of things my stories went into the magazine, and 
were paid for. Strange were the ways of this office ; 
Shakespeare might have sent in prose and poetry, but he 
would have gone into the waste-paper basket had he not 
previously straddled. For those who were in the swim 
this was a matter of congratulation ; straddling we 
would cry, " We want no blooming outsiders coming 
along interfering with our magazine. And you, Smith, 
you devil, you had a twenty-page story in last month 
and cut me out. O'Flanagan, do you mind if I send 
you in a couple of poems as well as my regular stuff, 
that will make it all square ? " " I'll try to manage it ; 
here's the governor." And looking exactly like the un- 
fortunate Mr. Sedley, Mr. B. used to slouch along, and 
he would fall into his leather armchair, the one in which 
he wrote the cheques. The last time I saw that chair it 
was standing in the street, alas ! in the hands of the 
brokers. 

But conservative though we were in matters concern- 
ing "copy," though all means were taken to protect our- 
selves against interlopers, one who had not passed the 



l86 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

preliminary stage of straddling would occasionally slip 
through our defences. I remember one especially. It 
was a hot summer's day, we were all on the counter, our 
legs swinging, when an enormous young man entered. 
He must have been six feet three in height. He was 
shown into Mr. B.'s room, he asked him to read a MS., 
and he fled, looking very frightened. " Waste-paper 
basket, waste-paper basket," we shouted when Mr. B. 
handed us the roll of paper. " What an odd-looking fish 
he is !" said O'Flanagan; " I wonder what his MS. is 
like." We remonstrated in vain, O'Flanagan took the 
MS. home to read, and returned next morning convinced 
that he had discovered an embryo Dickens. The young 
men was asked to call, his book was accepted, and we 
adjourned to the bar. 

A few weeks afterwards this young man took rooms in 
the house next to me on the ground floor. He was ter- 
ribly inflated with his success, and was clearly determined 
to take London by storm. He had been to Oxford, and 
to Heidelberg, he drank beer and smoked long pipes, he 
talked of nothing else. Soon, very soon, I grew consci- 
ous that he thought me a simpleton ; he pooh-poohed 
my belief in Naturalism and declined to discuss the 
symbolist question. He curled his long legs upon the 
rickety sofa and spoke of the British public as the " B. 
P.," and of the magazine as the " mag." There were 
generally tea-things and jam-pots on the table. In a 
little while he brought a little creature about five feet 
three to live with with him. and when the little creature 
and the long creature went out together, it was like Don 
Quixote and Sancho Panza setting forth in quest of 
adventuries in the land of Strand. The little creature 
indulged in none of the loud, rasping affectation of 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 187 

humor that was so maddening in the long creature ; the 
little creature was dry, hard, and sterile, and when he did 
join in the conversation it was like an empty nut between 
the teeth — dusty and bitter. He was supposed to be 
going in for the law, but the part of him to which he 
drew our attention was his knowledge of the Elizabethan 
dramatists. He kept a pocket-book, in which he held 
an account of his reading. Holding the pocket-book 
between finger and thumb, he would say, " Last year I 
read ten plays by Nash, twelve by Peele, six by Greene, 
fifteen by Beaumont and Fletcher, and eleven anony- 
mous plays, — fifty-four in all." He neither praised nor 
blamed, he neither extolled nor criticised ; he told you 
what he had read, and left you to draw your own con- 
clusions. 

What the little creature thought of the long creature I 
never discovered, but with every new hour I became 
freshly sensible that they held me in still decreasing 
estimation. This, I remember, was wildly irritating to 
me. I knew myself infinitely superior to them ; I knew 
the long creature's novel was worthless ; I knew that I 
had fifty books in me immeasurably better than it, and 
savagely and sullenly I desired to trample upon them, to 
rub their noses in their feebleness ; but oh, it was I who 
was feeble ! and full of visions of a wider world I raged 
up and down the cold walls of impassable mental limita- 
tions. Above me there was a barred window, and, but 
for my manacles, I would have sprung at it with my teeth. 
Then passion was so strong in me that I could scarce 
refrain from jumping off the counter, stamping my feet, 
and slapping my friends in the face, so tepid were their 
enthusiasms, so thin did their understanding appear to 
me. The Straddlers seemed inclined for a moment to 






1 88 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

take the long creature very seriously, and in the office 
which I had marked down for my own I saw him installed 
as a genius. 

Fortunately for my life and my sanity, my interests 
were, about this time, attracted into other ways — ways 
that led into London life, and were suitable for me to 
tread. In a restaurant where low-necked dresses and 
evening clothes crushed with loud exclamations, where 
there was ever an odor of cigarette and brandy and soda, 
I was introduced to a Jew of whom I had heard much, 
a man who had newspapers and race-horses. The bright 
witty glances of his brown eyes at once prejudiced me in 
his favor, and it was not long before I knew that I had 
found another friend. His house was what was wanted, 
for it was so trenchant in character, so different to all I 
knew of, that I was forced to accept it. without likening 
it to any French memory and thereby weakening the 
impression. It was a house of champagne, late hours, 
and evening clothes, of literature and art, of passionate 
discussions. So this house was not so alien to me as all 
else I had seen in London : and perhaps the cosmopoli- 
tanism of this charming Jew, his Hellenism, in fact, was 
a sort of plank whereon I might pass and enter again 
into English life. I found in Curzon Street another 
" Nouvelle Athenes," a Bohemianism of titles that went 
back to the Conquest, a Bohemianism of the ten sover- 
eigns always jingling in the trousers pocket, of scrupulous 
cleanliness, of hansom cabs, of ladies' pet names ; of 
triumphant champagne, of debts, gaslight, supper-parties 
morning light, coaching ; a fabulous Bohemianism ; a 
Bohemianism of eternal hard-upishness and eternal 
squandering of money, — money that rose at no discover- 
able well-head and flowed into a sea of boudoirs and 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 189 

restaurants, a sort of whirlpool of sovereigns in which 
we were caught, and sent eddying through music halls, 
bright shoulders, tresses of hair, and slang; and I joined 
in the adorable game of Bohemianism that was played 
round and about Piccadilly Circus, with Curzon Street 
for a magnificent rallying-point. 

After dinner a general " clear" was made in the direc- 
tion of halls, and theatres, a few friends would drop in 
about twelve, and continue their drinking till three or 
four ; but Saturday night was gala-night — at half-past 
eleven the lords drove up in their hansoms, then a genius 
or two would arrive, and supper and singing went mer- 
rily until the chimney-sweeps began to go by, and we 
took chairs and bottles into the street and entered into 
discussion with the policeman. Twelve hours later we 
struggled out of our beds, and to the sound of church 
bells we commenced writing. The paper appeared on 
Tuesday. Our host sat in a small room off the dining- 
room from which he occasionally emerged to stimulate 
our lagging pens. 

But I could not learn to see life paragraphically. I 
longed to give a personal shape to something, and per- 
sonal shape could not be achieved in a paragraph nor in 
an article. True it is that I longed for art, but I longed 
also for fame, or was it notoriety ? Both. I longed for 
fame, fame, brutal and glaring, fame that leads to noto- 
riety. Out with you, liars that you are, tell the truth, 
say you would sell the souls you don't believe in, or do 
believe in, for notoriety. I have known you attend 
funerals for the sake of seeing your miserable names in 
the paper. You, hypocritical reader, who are now turn- 
ing up your eyes and murmuring " horrid young man " — 
examine your weakly heart, and see what divides us ; I 



190 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

am not ashamed of my appetites, I proclaim them ; what 
is more I gratify them ; you're silent, you refrain, and 
you dress up natural sins in hideous garments of shame ; 
you would sell your wretched soul for what I would not 
give the parings of my finger-nails for — paragraphs in a 
society paper. I am ashamed of nothing I have done, 
especially my sins, and I boldly confess that I then de- 
sired notoriety. I walked along the streets mad ; I 
turned upon myself like a tiger. " Am I going to fail 
again as I have failed before ? " I asked myself. " Will 
my novel prove as abortive as my paintings, my poetry, 
my journalism ? " I looked back upon my life — medi- 
ocrity was branded about my life. " Would it be the 
same to the end ? " I asked myself a thousand times 
by day, and a thousand times by night. We all want 
notoriety ; your desire for notoriety is hideous if you 
will, but it is less hideous when it is proclaimed from a 
brazen tongue than when it hides its head in the cant of 
human humanitarianism. Humanity be hanged ! Self, 
and after self a friend ; the rest may go to the devil ; 
and be sure that when any man is more stupidly vain 
and outrageously egotistic than his fellows, he will hide 
his hideousness in humanitarianism. Victor Hugo was 
hideous with self, and the innermost stench of the 
humanitarianism he vented about him is unbearable to 
any stomach, not excepting even Mr. Swinburne's, who 
occasionally holds his nose with one hand while he 
waves the censer with the other. Humanity be hanged ! 
Men of inferior genius, Victor Hugo and Mr. Glad- 
stone, take refuge in it. Humanity is a pigsty, where 
liars, hypocrites, and the obscene in spirit congregate ; 
it has been so since the great Jew conceived it, and it 
will be so till the end. Far better the blithe modern 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 191 

pagan in his white tie and evening clothes, and his 
facile philosophy. He says, " I don't care how the poor 
live; my only regret is that they live at all"; and he 
gives the beggar a shilling. 

We all want notoriety ; our desires on this point, as 
upon others, are not noble, but the human is very 
despicable vermin and only tolerable when it tends to 
the brute, and away from the evangelical. I will tell 
you an anecdote which is in itself an admirable illustra- 
tion of my craving for notoriety ; and my anecdote will 
serve a double purpose, — it will bring me some of the 
notoriety of which I am so desirous, for you, dear, ex- 
quisitely hypocritical reader, will at once cry, " Shame ! 
Could a man be so wicked as to attempt to force on a 
duel, so that he might make himself known through the 
medium of a legal murder ? " You will tell your friends 
of this horribly unprincipled young man, and they will, 
of course, instantly want to know more about him. 

It was a gala-night in Curzon Street ; the lords were 
driving up in hansoms ; shouts and oaths ; some seated 
on the roofs with their legs swinging inside ; the comics 
had arrived from the halls ; there were ladies, many 
ladies ; choruses were going merrily in the drawing- 
room ; one man was attempting to kick the chandelier, 
another stood on his head on the sofa. There was a 
beautiful young lord there, that sort of figure that no 
woman can resist. There was a delightful chappie who 
seemed inclined to empty the mustard-pot down my 
neck ; him I could keep in order, but the beautiful lord 
I saw was attempting to make a butt of me. With his 
impertinences I did not for a moment intend to put up ; 
I did not know him ; he was not then, as he is now, if he 
will allow me to say so, a friend. About three or half- 



192 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

past the ladies retired, and the festivities continued with 
unabated vigor. We had passed through various stages, 
not of intoxication, no one was drunk, but of jubilation ; 
we had been jocose and rowdy ; we had told stories of all 
kinds. The young lord and I did not "pull well 
together"; but nothing decidedly unpleasant occurred 
until some one proposed to drink to the downfall of 
Gladstone. The beautiful lord got on his legs and be- 
gan a speech. Politically it was sound enough, but 
much of it was intended to turn me into ridicule. I 
answered sharply, working gradually up crescendo, until 
at last, to bring matters to a head, I said : 

" I don't agree with you ; the Land Act of '81 was a 
necessity." 

" Any one who thinks so must be a fool." 

"Very possibly, but I don't allow people to address 
such language to me, and you must be aware that to 
call any one a fool, sitting with you at table in the house 
of a friend, is the act of a cad." 

There was a lull ; then a moment after he said, " I 
meant politically." 

" And I only meant socially." 

He advanced a step or two and struck me across the 
face with his finger-tips ; I took up a champagne bottle, 
and struck him across the head and shoulders. Differ- 
ent parties of revellers kept us apart, and we walked up 
and down on either side of the table swearing at each 
other. Although I was very wrath, I had had a certain 
consciousness from the first that if I played my cards 
well I might come very well out of the quarrel ; and as I 
walked down the street I determined to make every effort 
to force on a meeting. If the quarrel had been with one 
of the music-hall singers I should have backed out of it, 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 193 

but I had everything to gain by pressing it. I grasped 
the situation at once. All the Liberal press would be 
on my side, the Conservative press would have nothing 
to say against me, no woman in it and a duel with a lord 
in it would be carrion for the society papers. But the 
danger ? To the fear of death I do not think I was ever 
susceptible. I should have been afraid of a row with a 
music-hall singer, because I should have had much to 
lose by rowing with him, but as matters stood I had too 
much to gain to consider the possibilities of danger. 
Besides there was no need to consider. I knew very 
well there was no reality in it. I had broken sixteen 
plates consecutively at the order to fire dozens of times ; 
and yet it was three to one against my shooting a man 
at twenty paces ; so was it ten thousand to one against a 
man, who had probably only fired off a revolver half a 
dozen times in a back yard, hitting me. In the gallery you 
are firing at white or black, on the ground you are firing 
at black upon a neutral tint, a very different matter. In 
the gallery there is nothing to disturb you ; there is not 
a man opposite you with a pistol in his hand. In the 
gallery you are calm and collected ; you have risen at 
your ordinary hour, you are returning from a stroll 
through the sunlight ; on the ground your nerves are 
altered by unusual rising, by cold air, by long expecta- 
tion. It was three to one against my killing him, it was 
a hundred to one against his killing me. So I calculated 
the chances, so much as I took the trouble to calculate 
the chances, but in truth I thought very little of them ; 
when I want to do anything I do not fear anything, and 
I sincerely wanted to shoot this young man. I did not 
go to bed at once, but sat in the armchair thinking. 
Presently a cab came rattling up to the door, and one of 



194 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

the revellers came upstairs. He told me that every- 
thing had been arranged ; I told him I was not in the 
habit of allowing others to arrange my affairs for me, 
and went to bed. One thing, and only one thing puzzled 
me: who was I to ask to be my second ? My old friends 
were scattered, they had disappeared ; and among my 
new acquaintances I could not think of one that would 
do. None of the Straddlers would do, that was certain ; 
I wanted some one that could be depended upon, and 
whose social position was above question. Among my 
old friends I could think of some half-dozen that would 
suit me perfectly, but where were they? Ten years' 
absence scatters friends as October scatters swallows. 
At last my thoughts fixed themselves on one man. I 
took a hansom and drove to his house. I found him 
packing up, preparing to go abroad. This was not for- 
tunate. I took a seat on the edge of the dining-room 
table, and told him I wanted him to act for me in an 
affair of honor. I told him the story in outline. " I 
suppose," he said, " it was about one or two in the 
morning ? " 

" Later that that," I said : " it was about seven." 
" My dear fellow, he struck you, and not very hard, I 
should imagine ; you hit him with a champagne bottle, and 
now you want to have him out. I don't mind acting as 
intermediary, and settling the affair for you ; he will no 
doubt regret he struck you, and you will regret you 
struck him ; but really I cannot act for you, that is to 
say, if you are determined to force on a meeting. Just 
think ; supposing you were to shoot him, a man who has 
really done you no wrong." 

" My dear , I did not come here to listen to 

moral reflections ; if you don't like to act for me, say so." 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 195 

I telegraphed to Warwickshire to an old friend : 
" Can I count on you to act for me in an affair of 
honor ? " Two or three hours after the reply came. 
" Come down here and stay with me for a few days ; we'll 
talk it over." I ground my teeth ? what was to be done ? 
I must wire to Marshall and ask him to come over ; 
English people evidently will have nothing to do with 
serious duelling. " Of alt importance. Come over at 
once and act for me in an affair of honor. Bring the 
count with you ; leave him at Boulogne ; he knows the 

colonel of the ." The next day I received the 

following ; " Am burying my father ; so soon as he is 
underground will come." Was there ever such luck ? 
.... He won't be here before the end of the week. 
These things demand the utmost promptitude. Three 
or four days afterwards dreadful Emma told me a 
gentleman was upstairs taking a bath. " Holloa, Mar- 
shall, how are you ? Had a good crossing ? Awful 
good of you to come. . . The poor old gentleman went 
off quite suddenly, I suppose ? " 

" Yes ; found dead in his bed. He must have known 
he was dying, for he lay quite straight as the dead lie, 
his hands by his side — wonderful presence of mind." 

" He left no money ? " 

" Not a penny ; but I could manage it all right. 
Since my success at the Salon I have been able to 
sell my things. I am only beginning to find out now 
what a success that picture was. Je f assure, jefais 
Vecole . . . 

" Tu crois fa ... on fait Ve'cole aprls vingt ans de 
travail" 

" Mon ami, je f assure, fai un public qui me suit" 

" Mon ami, veux-tu que je te dis ce que tu a fait ; tu a 



196 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

fait encore une vulgarization, une jolie vulgarization, je 
veux Men, de la note invents par Millet j tu a ajoute' la 
note claire invente'e par Manet, enfin tu suis avec talent le 
mouvement moderne, voilh tout." 

" Par Ions oV autre chose : sur la question d'art on ne 
s'entend jamais. " 

When we were excited, Marshall and I always 
dropped into French. 

" And now tell me," he said, " about this duel." 

I could not bring myself to admit, even to Marshall, 
that I was willing to shoot a man for the sake of the 
notoriety it would bring me, not because I feared in him 
any revolt of conscience, but because I dreaded his 
sneers ; he was known to all Paris, I was an obscure 
something, living in an obscure lodging in London. 
Had Marshall suspected the truth he would have said 
pityingly, " My dear Dayne, how can you be so foolish ? 
why will you not be contented to live ? " etc. . . . Such 
homilies would have been maddening ; he was success- 
ful, I was not ; I knew there was not much in him, un 
feu de paille, no more, but what would I not have done 
and given for that feu de paille ? So I was obliged to 
conceal my real motives for desiring a duel, and I spoke 
strenuously of the gravity of the insult and the neces- 
sity of retribution. But Marshall was obdurate. 
" Insult ? " he said. " He hit you with his hand, you 
hit him with the champagne bottle ; you can't have him 
out after that ; there is nothing to avenge, you wiped out 
the insult yourself ; if you had not struck him with the 
champagne bottle the case would be different." 

We went out to dine, we went to the theatre, and after 
the theatre we went home and aestheticized till three in 
the morning. I spoke no more of the duel, I was sick 



CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 97 

of it ; luck, I saw, was against me, and I let Marshall 
have his way. He showed his usual tact, a letter was 
drawn up in which my friend withdrew the blow of his 
hand, I withdrew the blow of the bottle, and the letter 
was signed by Marshall and two other gentlemen. 

Hypocritical reader, you draw your purity garments 
round you, you say, " How very base ! " but I say unto 
you, remember how often you have longed, if you are a 
soldier in her Majesty's army, for war, — war that would 
bring every form of sorrow to a million fellow-creatures, 
and you longed for all this to happen, because it might 
bring your name into the Gazette. Hypocritical reader, 
think what you like of me, your hypocrisy will alter 
nothing ; in telling you of my vices I am only telling you 
of your own ; hypocritical reader, in showing you my 
soul I am showing you your own ; hypocritical reader, 
exquisitely hypocritical reader, you are my brother, I 
salute you. 

Day passed over day : I lived in that horrible lodging ; 
I continued to labor at my novel ; it seemed an impossi- 
ble task — defeat glared at me from every corner of that 
frouzy room. My English was so bad, so thin, — stupid 
colloquialisms out of joint with French idiom. I learnt 
unusual words and stuck them up here and there : they 
did not mend the style. Self-reliance had been lost in 
past failures ; I was weighed down on every side, but I 
struggled to bring the book somehow to a close. Noth- 
ing mattered to me, but this one thing. To put an end 
to the landlady's cheating, and to bind myself to remain 
at home, I entered into an arrangement with her that she 
was to supply me with board and lodgings for three 
pounds a week, and henceforth resisting all Curzon Street 
temptations, I trudge home through November fogs, to 



198 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 

eat a chop in a frouzy lodging-house. I studied the 
horrible servant as one might an insect under a micro- 
scope. " What an admirable book she would make, but 
what will the end be ? if I only knew the end ! " I had 
more and more difficulty in keeping the fat landlady at 
arm's length, and the nasty child was well beaten one 
day for lingering about my door. I saw poor Miss L. 
nightly, on the stairs of this infamous house, and I 
never wearied of talking to her of her hopes and ambi- 
tions, of the young man she admired. She used to ask 
me about my novel. 

Poor Miss L. ! Where is she ? I do not know, but I 
shall not forget the time when I used to listen for her 
footstep on the midnight stairs. Often I was too despond- 
ent ; when my troubles lay too heavily and darkly upon 
me, I let her go up to her garret without a word. Des- 
pondent days and nights when I cried, Shall I never pass 
from this lodging ? shall I never be a light in that Lon- 
don, long, low, misshapen, that dark monumental stream 
flowing through the lean bridges ; and what if I were a 
light in this umber-colored mass, — shadows falling, barges 
moored midway in a monumental stream ? Happiness 
abides only in the natural affections — in a home and a 
sweet wife. Would she whom I saw to-night marry me ? 
How sweet she was in her simple naturalness, the joys 
she has known have been slight and pure, not violent 
and complex as mine. Ah, she is not for me, I am not 
fit for her, I am too sullied for her lips. . . . Were I to 
win her could I be dutiful, true ? . . . 

" Young men, young men whom I love, dear ones 
who have rejoiced with me, not the least of our pleasures 
is the virtuous woman ; after excesses there is reaction ; 
all things are good in nature, and they are foolish young 






CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. I99 

men who think that sin alone should be sought for. 
The feast is over for me ; I have eaten and drunk ; I 
yield my place, do you eat and drink as I have ; do you 
be young as I was. I have written it ! The world is not 
worth erasure ; if it is not true to-day it will be in two 
years hence ; farewell ! I yield my place, do you be 
young as I was, do you love youth as I did ; remember 
you are the most interesting beings under heaven, for 
you all sacrifices will be made, you will be feted and 
adored upon the condition of remaining young men. 
The feast is over for me, I yield my place, but I will not 
make this leave-taking more sorrowful than it is already 
by afflicting you with advice and instruction how to 
obtain what I have obtained. I have spoken bitterly 
against education, I will not strive to educate you, you 
will educate yourselves. Dear ones, dear ones, the 
world is your pleasure, you can use it at your will. 
Dear ones, I see you all about me still, I yield my place ; 
but one more glass I will drink with you ; and while 
drinking I would say my last word — were it possible I 
would be remembered by you as a young man : but I 
know too well that the young never realize that the old 
were not born old. Farewell." 

I shivered ; the cold air of morning blew in my face ; 
I closed the window, and sitting at the table, haggard 
and overworn, I continued my novel. 



THE END. 



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